CHRISTIANITY IN THE NEW AGE 



CHRISTIANITY IN 
THE NEW AGE 



, BY 

E> HERMAN 

Author of " The Meaning and Value of Mysticism," etc. 



NEW YORK 
FUNK AND WAGNALLS COMPANY 






0ift 

Publisher 



My Minister and Friend, 
REV. IVOR J. ROBERTON, M.A., 

who taught one " whose eye is Beauty's 
powerless slave " to discern the Beauty 
of the Sanctuary, and under whose war- 
time preaching this book took shape. 



PREFACE 

'* It is no small prudence to keep silence in an 
evil time," says Thomas a Kempis ; and 
though the dark night is past and the day of 
victory has come, silence still commends itself 
as a counsel of discretion. For this is ^a time 
of obscure and tangled issues, of the seething 
turmoil of new and dying tendencies and the 
blind struggle of unborn and half -born impulses. 
What we took to be an ordered map has re- 
solved itself into a chaos of crossing lines, and 
the only thing to be asserted with confidence 
about a complex of life and thought so full 
of intricacy and contradiction is its utter im- 
predicability. 

Yet it is precisely at this stage, when our 
early confidence in our ability to read the signs 
of the times has been shattered, and we have 
resigned ourselves to tread an unknown path 
(sobeit He who leads us does not remain un- 
known), that there have come to some of us a 
discernment of the root-causes of our past failure 

vii 



Preface 

and present weakness, a perception of our funda- 
mental needs, and a vision of the great Source 
of reinforcement and renewal which were not 
ours in the days of our comparative certitude. 
We have learnt to acquiesce in an obscurity of 
events and ambiguity of movements which before 
we have deemed intolerable ; but our acquiescence 
is not the dull submission of pessimism. It is 
born rather of the quiet trustfulness of those 
whom the smaller uncertainties of a fleeting crisis 
have driven back upon the larger certainties of 
that permanent reality which gives that crisis 
its meaning and value. To keep silence con- 
cerning the things which have thus come to us 
may be in accord with the promptings of a justi- 
fiable diffidence in face of a responsible task, and 
with the counsels of a less creditable prudence. 
But deeper than all such considerations is the 
conviction that it is precisely at this so perplexing 
time that the most faltering voice that can 
speak of '* a sure word of prophecy" amid the 
Babel of conflicting pronouncements, and of a 
vision of the Desire of Nations walking upon 
the troubled waters of the world's life, has the 
burden of utterance laid upon it. Out of such 
a conviction this book is sent forth. 

viii 



Preface 

In the nature of things, a volume deaUng 
with the exigencies of the new age upon which 
we have entered must be largely critical. The 
effect of prolonged war has been to fling a sharp 
and inexorable light upon the seamy places of 
our religious Ufe, to shatter many idols and destroy 
many illusions. To ignore this in the supposed 
interests of reconstruction is to make anything 
like vaUd reconstruction impossible. I have there- 
fore begun by pointing out in Part I. certain 
*' Perils of the Threshold " : an impatience with 
the past which is threatening to rob us of our 
present vision, and a tendency to pessimism 
which spells paralysis. Nor have I hesitated to 
introduce the element of diagnosis into subsequent 
chapters. To know and ponder our present state 
is not merely the first step towards amendment, 
but such knowledge often carries the whole secret 
of reconstruction within itself. 

In Part II. — '* The Christian Message to the 
New Age '' — ^I have endeavoured to express my 
sense of the Church's urgent need to recover her 
teaching function. We have for so long played 
with such catchwords as '' dead knowledge,'' 
" abstract thought," and *' barren intellectuaHsm/' 
that we have all but forgotten how vital a 

ix 



Preface 

thing religious knowledge can be, what world- 
moving dynamic lies latent in right thinking. 
" Learn to think/' said a shrewd man ; ''it will 
profit you— there is so little competition." We 
are waiting for a Church that will teach us how 
to think. It is for want of the type of religious 
instruction that promotes hard, honest thinking 
that so much religious devotion remains blind, 
so much noble sacrifice devoid of moral power, 
so much strenuous endeavour lacking in intelli- 
gent purpose. That the Church must once more 
resume her teaching office, and that in her teach- 
ing she must concentrate upon the great funda- 
mental realities of the nature of God and the 
meaning of the Cross, is writ large in the experi- 
ence of all who have come into contact with our 
fighting men. For too long the pulpit has tended 
to avoid central issues and to decline upon the 
minor moods and tenses of the Christian ex- 
perience. To-day it is borne in upon us once 
more — and in painful fashion — that the Church 
lives by her message, and that the Church without 
a message concerning God and the Cross is dead 
while she liveth. 

In devoting Part III. to the consideration of 
Christianity as ''The Great Adventure/' I have 



Preface 

sought to emphasise three cognate needs, always 
present yet never so sharply recognised as to-day. 
Much that has hitherto been considered necessary 
for the persistence of Christianity many are now 
prepared to surrender with more than equanimity ; 
but three things we must have — an adventurous 
individual discipleship, an adventurous theology, 
and an adventurous Church. Believing that 
the free religious personality is fundamental to 
Christianity, I put in a plea for a new religious 
individualism. Haunted by the spectre of the 
eighteenth-century fiction of the isolated, self- 
contained individual, we have tended of late to 
lay a vicious emphasis upon the corporate life 
of the Church, exalting the corporate Christian 
consciousness as if it were in opposition to the 
individual consciousness, a higher stage only to 
be reached by the sacrifice of individual interests. 
Such a contention rests, I am persuaded, upon 
an essentially materialistic conception of the 
Church, regrettably reinforced in these days by 
the popular comparison of the Church to an 
army, and perpetuating the most un-Catholic 
element in the Roman ideal of the Church. The 
true Church is founded upon free Christian 
personality, and stands for a living theology 

xi 



Preface 

and for an adventurous policy, very little con- 
cerned about securing the continuation of its 
existence, but supremely concerned for the King- 
dom of God. 

I am indebted for stimulus to the fine body 
of religious war literature, especially to those 
two notable volumes, ''Faith or Fear?" and 
''The Church in the Furnace." A re-reading 
of Professor Oman's profound and far-seeing 
book, '' Vision and Authority," has greatly helped 
to confirm and clarify a conception of the Church 
towards which I had been struggling for some 
years. 

My warmest thanks are due to my husband, 
who has read the manuscript and made many 
valuable criticisms and suggestions, and has 
also revised the proofs. 

E. H. 

London, 

January, 1919. 



Xll 



CONTENTS 

PART I 
Perils of the Threshold 



CHAPTER 



1. Detachment from the Past ... 3 

2. The Snare of Pessimism . . . .30 

PART 11 

The Ghristian Message to the New Age 

3. The Church as Teacher . . . -53 

4. The Need for a New Thought qf God . 79 

5. The Highway of the Cross . . .105 

6. The Cross and the Altar . . . . 126 

PART III 
The Great Adventure 

7. The Need for an Adventurous Theology . 163 

8. The Call for Adventurous Discipleship . 196 

9. The Call for an Adventurous Church . 224 



PART I 
PERILS OF THE THRESHOLD 



CHRISTIANITY IN THE 

NEW AGE 

CHAPTER I 

DETACHMENT FROM THE PAST 



Every great crisis in history appears to those 
who pass through it as a cleaving sword severing 
the past from the present. Yesterday recedes 
into antiquity ; to-morrow is seen as the first 
chapter in an entirely new book of life. In the 
shaking of things that can be shaken, things 
that cannot be shaken vanish from view. The 
law of evolution seems no longer to operate ; 
the idea of continuity appears untenable. From 
the narrow island of the present we gaze across 
to the continent of the past, and find it hard to 
realise that only a little while ago the strip we 
stand on was part of that mainland which already 
seems so strange and shadowy in the haze of 
distance. When we are told that our insulation 
must spell impoverishment, we reply with an 
incredulous smile. Things have happened over- 
nighty as it were, which our arm-chair philosophers 

3 



Christianity in the New Age 

and antiquarians little reck of. New and un- 
familiar problems have arisen such as the past 
never knew, and therefore cannot help to solve. 
A new vision and a new demand have created 
a new mind that cannot work with the old tools. 
This sense of sudden and forcible detachment 
from the past has been characteristic of all great 
historic revolutions, but perhaps it has never 
been so widespread or so acute as at the present 
juncture. True, it does not emerge with equal 
sharpness in all classes and types of men. In 
the case of what is conveniently termed " the man 
in the street," it has not wrought so palpable a 
change, for ''the man in the street" has never 
been distinguished by an historical mind. On 
the contrary, his lack of imagination has caused 
him to hold tradition in unmitigated contempt. 
For him the dead were always in the wrong, or 
rather they did not exist at all, for his concep- 
tion of human solidarity is limited by the circle 
of the living. Nor does this sense of cleavage 
emerge most strikingly in quarters more or less 
dominated by scientific ideas. For the scientist 
the past is certainly of great value. He freely 
uses its discoveries and achievements, and takes 
its struggles and aspirations into full account. 
He does not, however, attribute any binding 
authority to it ; his attitude is completely free 
and critical. He rejects the findings of the 
past whenever the facts of the case demand it 
without the ghost of a regret, let alone a scruple ; 



Detachment from the Past 

and while he may admire and even reverence 
its achievements, he never does so on the ground 
of their venerable antiquity. It is indeed only 
when we turn to the Christian community and 
to the circle of those who are, often unconsciously, 
influenced by Christian teaching that we see the 
full effect of an upheaval that has cut time in 
two. 

For Christian thought has always gloried in 
its historical continuity. The Church has lived 
and moved in an atmosphere of tradition and 
symbolism. Theologians have ever been dis- 
tinguished by a strong and sensitive historical 
instinct. When the mind of the age challenged 
theology with being inadequate to the demands 
of the time, they contended that such inadequacy, 
where it existed, was due, not to an exaggerated 
reverence for the past, but to a failure to grasp 
and interpret it aright. Similarly, when critics 
of the traditional Church organisation emphasised 
its utter failure to attract the masses of men, 
they invariably attributed that failure, not to a 
vicious adherence to the old forms, but to an 
inability to enter into their spirit and thus adapt 
them to modern needs. 

But within the last three or four years this 
attitude has received a rude shock. War has 
revealed a situation it can no longer meet. 
In being brought face to face with '' Tommy,'* 
we have made the disconcerting discovery of a 
whole nation radically estranged from traditional 

5 . 



Christianity in the New Age 

forms of Christianity. The comforting reflection 
that, after all, soldiers are abnormal and ephemeral 
appearances, destined to vanish into thin air at 
the first touch of peace, did not bear a moment's 
scrutiny ; for Tommy was not a soldier in the 
old sense of the term : he was simply a student, 
a clerk, or a mechanic, in khaki. He existed 
before the war, and will continue to exist after- 
wards. He represents, in fact, the great public 
whose temper and needs we had studied for so 
long from a distance, and now at last have been 
given an opportunity of seeing at close range. 
Our contact with him has flung a shrewd and 
searching light into dark places. It has revealed 
a soul of goodness in the most unlikely men, and 
also an uncompromising opposition to conven- 
tional ideals of saintliness ; an astounding ignor- 
ance of elementary religious truths, and an almost 
uncannily sure instinct for vital reality ; a 
wistful longing for a truer life, and a humiliating 
contempt for conventional religion. And, most 
disconcerting of all, it has revealed, together 
with a new kinship and ease of approach along 
all simple human ways, a cleavage in deeper 
things between us who represent the Church 
and the men who in some respects are so near 
to the Kingdom, which no amount of mere ex- 
planation can bridge. It is easy to account 
for this cleavage in an historical fashion, but 
that does not lessen its sheer intractability. 
After one has succeeded in tracing its origin 

6 



Detachment from the Past 

and following its development through the long 
series of blunders which stain the history of 
the Church, one is still confronted with the facts 
in their unmitigated grimness, and not a whit 
nearer the solution of the problem. One is still 
face to face with a de-Christianised England 
which none the less retains an instinct for Chris- 
tianity, but an instinct to which our religious 
conceptions and the way in which we express 
them utterly fail to appeal. 

We find no difficulty in believing that it took 
decades of preaching and teaching before a 
people such'' as the Chinese could be brought to 
anything like an intelligent grasp of the simplest 
Christian conceptions, but since the war we have 
also come to suspect that those who will address 
themselves in the near future to the task of 
evangeUsing England must be prepared for almost 
as long a period of sowing the seed. The popular 
superstition that generations of Sunday-school 
teaching and an hereditary reverence for the 
Scriptures put the average Englishman into a 
position to grasp the Gospel and its implications 
almost instinctively has been finally exploded, 
and we have come to realise that the evangelisa- 
tion of a nominally Christian country is perhaps 
an even longer and harder business than pioneer 
missionary work in heathen lands. 

Chaplains of all denominations confirm this 
diagnosis. True, not a few of them find it easy 
to appeal to the nlen in frank, unconventional 

7 



Christianity in the New Age 

talk about the great realities, but it almost seems 
that the short-cut to success in talking to the 
men is to forget one's theological and ecclesiastical 
antecedents ; and this is full of grave augury 
for the future. The time is at hand when men 
in whom a new spirit has been kindled by 
the homely and untrammelled ministrations of 
their chaplains will return to the routine of 
ordinary life, and will need to be urged to seek 
connection with some religious body or congre- 
gation. They cannot be allowed to remain un- 
connected units ; nor can such an organisation 
as the Y.M.C.A. take the place of Church fellow- 
ship, for man is destined to worship in families, 
and to put an association intended only for men 
in the place of the Church is to create in the 
end a circumscribed and distorted outlook. But 
will these men find a type of life that appeals 
to them — a type of life, even, that they can 
understand — ^in the average congregation ? Many 
a chaplain is filled with misgiving as he looks 
into the near future. He realises that no amount 
of interpretation and adaptation can make the 
man he has learned to know in the trenches fit 
into the framework of the Church he knows so 
well. He thinks of those who, baptised in the 
cloud of fire and in the sea of blood, have come 
to the Lord and Redeemer of their life : how 
would they regard the average respectable con- 
gregation repeating the old formulae and working 
along the old lines, and how would that con- 

8 



Detachment from the Past 

gregation regard them ? He sees that not adapta- 
tion but reconstruction covering the whole range 
of the Church's Ufe and thought is needed ; but 
alas ! those who clamour for reconstruction are 
mostly without her gates, while those inside are 
either blindly complacent or waste their energies 
in a pathetic effort to put new patches on an 
old garment. They do not realise that a new 
task demands new tools, and many of them still 
refuse to admit that the task is new. Said a 
young chaplain on his return home, '* When I 
met my congregation again and realised with 
what trivial and irrelevant things they were 
occupied, and how little they understood of the 
big, vital things we had been up against in the 
trenches, it turned my heart sick within me." 

These words are representative. They express 
a feeling which is increasingly prevalent among 
men of vision. There is a growing sense of the 
imperative need for reconstruction — the con- 
sciousness of a demand which goes far deeper 
than questions of organisation or method, and 
whose central challenge is to the spirit of the 
Church rather than to her institutions — and there 
seems little chance of that demand being re- 
sponded to by its membership. Potentially the 
future is full of hope. There is a new wistfulness 
abroad which is surely God's opportunity, a new 
instinct for what is genuinely spiritual among 
those who are ignorant of the current spiritual 
vocabulary, and a new appreciation of the 

9 



Christianity in the New Age 

humility, the self-giving love, that are the essence 
of Christianity. But over against that there is 
a tragic failure on the part of the average Church 
member to realise this state of things. The 
stirring and pulsing of a new life outside the 
Church seems to have no correlative within. 



II 

But while this attitude of self-criticism on the 
part of thoughtful Churchmen, with its demand 
for radical reconstruction, holds the promise of 
a golden future, it has its peculiar perils. Born 
of that sense of cleavage between the past and 
the present which so revolutionary an experience 
as our-s inevitably creates, it easily slides into 
the assumption that the present situation is 
entirely new; not with the newness of summer 
fruit consummating a continuous process of 
growth from the first green shoots to the leafy 
crown gemmed with blossoms, but rather with 
the newness of an unclassiiiable meteor flashing 
suddenly into the sky, whose genesis and relation 
to the ascertained astronomical system no scientist 
can trace. And it is inevitable that such an 
assumption, coupled with the growing convic- 
tion of the Church's inadequacy, should breed 
qualities which, if unchecked, must in the long 
run cripple constructive thought and action- 
impatience with the past and pessimism with 
regard to the future. 

lO 



Detachment from the Past 

The times are new — of that there can be no 
doubt. History does not repeat itself in any 
literal and detailed fashion, no matter what the 
old adage says. And if each age, however natur- 
ally it seems to have sprung out of the preceding 
one, includes an element of originality, how 
much more this startling day of ours, which has 
brought the collapse of long-established systems 
and the emergence of ideals that are changing 
the face of the world before our eyes ? Yet it, 
like its predecessors, is not in its essence a nega- 
tion and refutation of the past. Its reaction 
against tradition owes its very strength to the 
educative pressure of that which it antagonises, 
and not a few of its most novel features strike 
hidden roots into a past remoter than the age we 
have just left behind us. It must be remembered 
also that movements and tendencies which, at 
first sight, seem to mark a new departure in a 
direction opposite to that of the past, are not 
seldom seen, on closer examination, to be a new 
departure, indeed, but not at all in the direction 
to which they seemed to point. 

A notable instance of our current misreading 
of contemporary movements is seen in the case 
of the alleged revival of interest in the future 
life. Before the war, it might have been said 
of the great mass of men that they were totally 
indifferent to the question of a life to come. 
Preachers found it difficult to interest their con- 
gregations in the subject ; books on immortality 

II 



Christianity in the New Age 

had only a lukewarm reception ; novels dealing 
with the whole gamut of theological questions 
had little or nothing to say about it. But with 
the sacrifice of so many young lives, the subject 
once more became of vital interest, and to-day 
it looms large in the popular mind. Men who 
sneered before are now stretching wistful hands 
towards the Unseen; women whose practical 
creed was a dainty materialism are seeking the 
Land that is very far off. Wherever a home has 
its empty chair, there the sorrow-laden air is 
murmurous with eager, inarticulate questionings. 
There must be a future life, cry a thousand 
stricken hearts ; for this life is too short and 
narrow to hold the treasure of our love. There 
must be golden streets up yonder ; no meaner 
pavement would be worthy of the golden lads 
who loved not their lives unto death. 

But beautiful and ennobling as all this is, and 
precious in the sight of God, it does not in itself 
constitute a religious interest in immortality ; 
and it is with the religious interest we are con- 
cerned. Even a cursory glance at current books 
on the subject goes to reveal this. Take Sir 
Oliver Lodge's '* Raymond," for instance, as 
the book that may claim to be typical of its 
class. It is not concerned with the life beyond 
in any deeply spiritual sense. It enshrines no 
prophetic vision of our eternal destiny ; it deals 
with no spacious and dynamic conception of the 
Divine purpose. Its object is solely to establish 

12 



Detachment from the Past 

the validity of certain messages purporting to 
come from the dead. The motive is not primarily 
religious but scientific, or quasi-scientific ; and 
the weight of interest does not fall upon the 
future at all, but upon the present. " Does my 
boy live ? Can he communicate with me ? Do 
those messages which I receive really come from 
him?'' These questions — ^heart-cries welling up 
from the pure depths of sorrowing love, and 
therefore demanding our most reverent sympathy 
— are not in themselves religious questions at 
all ; nor are the answers supplied by Sir Oliver 
Lodge and others religious answers. How far 
removed, indeed, such inquiries are from a 
genuinely religious interest in immortality may 
be seen by comparing the temper and outlook 
of a book like ''Raymond" with those of the 
Apocalypse. 

The Apocalypse is one of those books which, 
obscure, and, in one sense, remote from our day, 
yet speaks to us with no uncertain voice. It 
was written for communities which had precious 
memories of their martyred dead, and it came 
to them at a time when the first passionate ex- 
altation of the age of martyrdom had given place 
to declension and questioning, and '' doubts 
would come if God had kept his promises to men.'' 
" Where are our martyred dead ? " one can hear 
aged mothers crying from out the dim past. 
*'Are they indeed before the throne of God, wear- 
ing the amaranthine crown of victory ? Did 

13 



Christianity in the New Age 

they indeed die for an everlasting kingdom ? 
Will they soon return with their Lord ? " Such 
questions doubtless stirred the ageless mother- 
heart and troubled the mind of manhood then 
as now. But though they too found their answer 
in the Apocalyptic vision, they were not central 
to its interest in the life beyond. The Apocalyptic 
vision is not conceived of in the manner of a 
spiritualistic experiment ; it is a large prophetic 
vision of the purposes of God with the world. 
Its symbolism was that of its age, but it is used 
to convey an ethical and spiritual message for 
all times. In it the dead speak, not of earth's 
trivialities, but of the noblest strivings and aspir- 
ations of mankind. They appear as witnesses, 
not to their own existence, but to the grace and 
truth that are at the heart of the Universe. 
Nothing, then, could be wider of the mark than 
to identify the present-day anxiety concerning 
the dead with the Christian hope. So long as 
man is human, so long will bereaved love ask 
for tidings of its dear ones beyond the veil. The 
attitude is neither new nor in itself religious ; 
it has merely reappeared to-day in a new form. 
Whereas formerly a materialistic science poured 
scorn upon '' supernatural '' phenomena, and 
spiritualism was at the mercy of superstition and 
fraud, science has now recovered from its material- 
istic debauch, and is investigating spiritualistic 
phenomena with open and even reverent mind. 
That is greatly to the good ; but as we have seen, 



Detachment from the Past 

it does not mean that spiritualistic inquiry is 
dominated by religious motives. It is, on the 
whole, a hopeful sign of the times ; but it does 
not point in the direction many optimists imagine. 



Ill 

But of all tendencies which hide the true 
significance of present-day movements from us, 
none is more disabling than that impatience with 
the past which is the besetting sin of prophetic 
spirits. It is not merely that these movements 
cannot be justly estimated, or even recognised 
for what they are, without constant reference to 
the past ; the interpretative and illuminating 
function of the past is, after all, not its*most 
momentous function, and its exclusive use as a 
medium of elucidation may, in fact, militate 
against the more vital interpretation from the 
standpoint of present insight and experience. 
Life is not ruled by precedent, and it is more 
important that I should be able to read the signs 
of the times by the light of the Spirit guiding 
us here and now than merely by the reflected 
beam that streams from the past. That re- 
flection will surely serve to clarify my vision 
and correct my judgment, but it must never be 
allowed to usurp the place of immediate appre- 
hension and present insight. 

The past, however, is far more than a key 

15 



Christianity in the New Age 

or an interpreter. It is itself not yet wholly 
elucidated. It is waiting for us to elicit its more 
vital meaning, its fuller content. Like the Bible, 
which since the war has become a new book to 
so many, it awaits our slow discovery. We are 
- — and rightly so- — impatient of traditionalism. 
Why should we go back to Nicaea for our theology, 
and to the Middle Ages for our ecclesiastical 
institutions ? But this is not a question of 
theology or of Church organisation ; it is some- 
thing far more primary that we are concerned 
with. Is there nothing in the past history of the 
Church — ^in the clash of theological controversies, 
the shaping of religious ideals, the history of 
classic institutions, the action and reaction of 
tendencies that have gone to create rival schools 
of thought and to rend the unity of the Church 
Catholic — is there nothing in all this that was 
wrought and written, not for its time, but for 
ours ? Is there nothing in Clement and Origen, 
in Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, 
that they themselves perceived but dimly in the 
totality of its implications, and is waiting to yield 
its hidden treasure to us and to our children ? 

The question suggests the endless labour of 
historical investigation, and we, who are not 
historical experts, and upon whom the shortness 
of the time and the urgency of immediate tasks 
press heavily, shrink from such slow processes. 
But here, if anywhere, the warning of '' more 
haste, less speed" applies, and our instinct for 

i6 



Detachment from the Past 

immediacy and short-cuts has already too often 
wasted the precious time we thought to save. 
Years ago we used to quote approvingly the 
Oxford rhyme which informed us that 

Greek flesh-worship, Roman luxury and sty of Epicurus^ 
They will kill us ere Professor Caird's philosophy can 
cure us. 

But we are learning at last that Christianity, 
like all vital 'processes, is a slow cure, and that 
its slowness is its efficacy. We are still too much 
under the sway of an ideal of quick efficiency 
which is typified in the Student Volunteer motto, 
'' The evangelization of the world in this gener- 
ation.'' A renewed study of the Church's history 
— a study not pedantic or antiquarian, yet as 
deep as mental candour, imagination and humility 
can make it — ^will not only illuminate the present 
with revealing light ; it will — what is far more 
to the point — make that original, long-delayed 
contribution to the present which is the justifica- 
tion, as it is the glory, bf such study. Suddenly, 
as we trace the growth of some dominating idea, 
or read the deathless words of some master- 
spirit, it will be as the swinging back of long- 
closed doors, and we shall enter into the inherit- 
ance that has waited for us through long years. 

An age of democracy should be the last to 
show any contempt for the past. We claim 
communion with all men ; shall we draw the 
line at death ? We appreciate the humorous 

c 17 



Christianity in the New Age 

aspect of the self-contained eighteenth-century 
individual, '' author of himself and knowing no 
other kin '' ; shall we contemplate a self-con- 
tained and isolated age that refuses affiliation to 
other ages without a smile ? We have scant 
patience with the pale contemplative, who cuts 
himself off from the society of Tom, Dick, and 
Harry, and retires into a select brotherhood ; 
but why are we so tolerant, of the robust and 
healthy present-day citizen, who cultivates the 
acquaintance of his barber and his billiard-marker, 
but refuses to keep company with Plato or St. 
Augustine ? A democratic instinct which em- 
braces only its contemporaries is a strangely 
limited and exclusive thing. It is perfectly true 
that preoccupation with the great ones of the 
past may blind us to the existence of present 
greatness walking incognito among us ; but it 
is truer still that a wise acquaintance with the 
past will make us less likely to allow greatness 
to pass us unnoticed, for it will teach us how easy 
it is to pass Socrates in the street and take him 
for a bottle-washer, and how often we have 
derided our dreamers and stoned our prophets. 

We may fairly claim for this age of ours that 
it has freed itself from all superstitious reverence 
for tradition, and is not likely to relapse into the 
cramping cult of antiquity. All the more should 
we take the lessons of history deeply to heart. 
The sobriety of vision which enables us to see 
the mistakes of the past with a perhaps unprece- 

i8 



Detachment from the Past 

dented clearness, ought surely also to put us 
into an unparalleled position for appropriating 
its most precious legacies. What will it avail 
that we view the past to-day unblinded by a 
superstitious reverence, if the same penetration 
does not serve us to elicit its hidden significance 
as the uncritical devotees of antiquity could not 
do ? We think we are entering upon a great 
period of reconstruction. If that is so, how can 
we justify our failure to avail ourselves of the 
critical and path-breaking work of past ages, 
which are a God-given preparation for such a 
period, and find their only vindication therein ? 
If we resolved to devote ^at least part of the time 
which we now give to the often futile discussion 
of purely ephemeral problems to the patient 
study of some great historic movement or system 
of thought germane to present difficulties, we 
would gain a depth of insight and a capacity for 
the effective handling of current questions that 
would astonish us. We need hardly repeat that 
such study cannot take the place of that direct, 
experimental approach to our problems from 
which nothing can absolve us ; but it ought to 
take the place of a good deal of disputation 
about these problems, which at best is but ''the 
honourable trifling of the conquered/* 

Moreover, the past is not something external 
to us, which we may ignore if we please ; it is 
woven into the texture of our own thought and 
life. Its mistakes, which we see so clearly to- 

19 



Christianity in the New Age 

day, have determined our own bent to an extent 
we can hardly estimate ; its fallacies and super- 
stitions have more foothold in us than we know, 
their expression in us differing too widely from 
their original form to be readily recognised. Its 
achievements and discoveries have entered into 
our blood, giving us that grasp and sagacity, 
that insight and perception, which we so seldom 
trace to their true source. Like Moliere's peasant, 
who talked prose without knowing it, we con- 
stantly reproduce — and often in tragic manner — 
the very past we so glibly criticise. We speak 
of Bergson with an Aristotelian or Platonic 
accent, as the case might be. We discuss Grace 
under the tyrannous shadow of Augustine, and 
where we violently repudiate the term and sub- 
stitute for it the Indwelling of God, we still remain 
under the spell of the ancients ; for we seldom 
use the words without falling into the old Greek 
vice of failing to distinguish between metaphor 
and reality, illustration and argument, being 
deceived by spatial and physical analogies. It is 
not a question of whether we shall be influenced 
by th'C past or not. We are influenced by it in 
the most intimate and inescapable way. What 
remains to be settled is whether we shall allow 
ourselves to be blindly or intelligently influenced : 
whether we prefer the dead hand of the past 
to gird and lead us unbeknown to ourselves, or 
whether we choose to lay the living hand of 
the present upon the past in appropriation and dis- 

20 



Detachment from the Past 

crimination. These questions surely admit of 
only one answer. We cannot escape from the 
past, and the only way of ceasing to be its blind, 
unconscious slaves and becoming its free, intelligent 
heirs is, first of all, to study it, not necessarily 
with the minuteness of the historical expert — a 
process which, needless to say, is open only to the 
very few — ^but with the teachable mind of those 
who would discern the way of God in the broad 
movements of the Church's history. 

A great discovery awaits such students, for 
it is one of the functions of the past to reveal 
Him in whom all the ages live. If the history 
of the Apostolic Church reveals His educative 
and inspiring touch, can we deny it of any later 
period, or of the history of religious thought 
outside the Church altogether ? The truths of 
history are not *' accidental ''; they have a spiritual 
authority, a timelessness, a particularity, a dy- 
namic and creative power that belong to life. 
They are not alien to us. In them Jesus appears 
in ** yet another form,'' and our most intimate 
experiences are confirmed, interpreted and en- 
larged by contact with them. We hear His 
voice saying, ''Have I been solong time with 
you, and yet hast thou not known Me ?" And our 
fragmentary and incoherent experiences are unified 
by being related to the larger whole. One wonders 
how much of our slowness to discern in the move- 
ments of our time Him who leads all the genera- 
tions on is due to our failure to give heed to 

21 



Christianity in the New Age 

" the voice behind/' To confine the living word 
of Christ for the hour to the intuitions of that 
hour is as narrowing as to confine it within the 
boards of the Bible. 



IV 

We are all agreed that the times call for 
theological reconstruction. Of theological re- 
statement, i.e. the translation of traditional 
conceptions into modern language, we have 
had enough; what we need is the creation of 
new conceptions corresponding to our new ex- 
perience of God. And in approaching this great 
task, much will depend upon our attitude to 
the past. 

There are two classes of people, other than the 
upholders of traditionalism, who invariably oppose 
theological reconstruction. There are those who 
make war upon theology in the name of religion, 
and those who make war upon what they call 
traditional theology in the name of theological 
freedom — by which is generally meant the right 
to ignore the past. The first tell us that it is 
not theology that matters but the soul's vital 
communion with God, and that theology, so far 
from promoting that converse, has always obscured 
and hindered it. The second contend that what 
is wanted is not theological r^-construction, but 
construction de novo. They are not merely im- 

22 



Detachment from the Past 

patient but positively intolerant of the past ; 
they demand that the theological slate be wiped 
clean before they consent to set chalk to it. 

The first type is a belated sufferer from that 
vicious opposition between religion and theology 
which a generation ago produced some of the 
most futile discussions upon which strong men 
ever wasted brain and breath. Theology, while 
entirely distinct from religious experience, is in- 
separable from it ; and we have coupled our 
need for a new vision of God with the demand 
for theological reconstruction because there can 
be no authentic theological reconstruction except 
in the light of a present vision. It is not enough 
to say that theology is the description, the in- 
tellectual formulation and interpretation, of 
religious experience ; * it is itself largely, though 
not entirely, created and conditioned by that 
experience. In other words, every authentic 
religious experience involves a living theology, 
and the experience of each successive generation 
carries within itself the demand for theological 
reconstruction. If it is true that experience is 
the vital part of the subject-matter of theology, 
it is also true that theology is part of religious 
experience ; for experience, where it is something 
more than a mere devotional feeling or mystic 

* To say that " theology is only a side-product of Chris- 
tianity " (Charles E. Raven, "What think Ye of Christ ? " p. 51) 
is beside the mark. One might as well say that Newton's dis- 
covery of the law of gravitation is a by-product of the apple 
as it falls from the tree. 

23 



Christianity in the New Age 

mood, includes a creative demand for a reasoned 
interpretation. 

Where, on the other hand,the rights of theology 
are fully recognised, but it is insisted that each 
age must begin its theologising entirely de novo, 
we are faced with a depreciation of the past 
which rests upon a misconception of its signifi- 
cance for the present. Such a demand proceeds 
upon the assumption that a theology which 
takes the thought of past ages into serious account 
is to be deprecated as '' traditional/' But while 
a servile and superstitious attitude to the past 
obviously spells traditionalism, what makes a 
theology traditional is not docility to the teaching 
of the past, but disregard of the demands of 
the present. The function of theology is to 
interpret the facts of religious experience as 
they present themselves to its omm age ; and where 
it ignores these facts, or tries to bring them under 
superseded categories — ix. where it is traditional 
— it ipso facto ceases to be theology in any real 
sense, and becomes part of that dogmatic in- 
heritance which it is the business of theology 
to examine and interpret in the light of the present 
day. Mobility is an essential of all living theology. 
Theological thought will change from age to age 
in proportion as it is genuine ; and a serious and 
sympathetic study of the past, so far from arrest- 
ing the development of theology, is precisely the 
factor which will guide it from the eddies of mere 
flux and change into the broad stream of progress. 

24 



Detachment from the Past 

This is sufficiently evident on the surface. 
The student, for instance, whose ignorance of 
history prevents him from recognising the Gnostic 
touch in Mr. H. G. Wells, or the recrudescence 
of mediaeval Pantheism in a type of theology 
still called *'New'' in some quarters, or the 
Pelagianism peculiar to some novelists in treating 
of sin and redemption, or the Docetism which 
ensnares certain modern writers who imagine 
themselves to be thinking in Johannine categories, 
will not be the man whose estimate of present- 
day theological tendencies will be of much account. 
No one really knows the spirit of his age except 
in so far as he can trace its relation to the spirit 
of past ages. The past does not live in books 
merely. It follows us, and often it is its least 
desirable characteristics that have a disconcerting 
trick of survival and resurrection. Hence it 
comes about that the ''New" theologian, who 
makes a virtue of starting clear of the traditional 
incubus, generally ends in producing a composite 
and motley system, wondrously patched together 
out of fragments of old and superseded theories 
— the only really new thing about it being the 
thread of temperament and of present-day mental 
emphasis and accent which keeps the patches 
together. 

But the study of the past has a deeper refer- 
ence to the work of theological reconstruction 
than this obvious application goes to show. In 
our haste to escape from the bonds of ancient 

25 



Christianity in the New Age 

and authoritative tradition, we have often for- 
gotten that the present has its traditions also, 
and that their hold upon us is as paralysing as, 
and far more insidious than, any shackles forged 
by the past. '' The air is thick with bastard 
traditions," as Dr. Hort reminds us, *' which 
carry us captive unawares while we seem to 
ourselves to be exercising our freedom and our 
instinct for truth. The traditions of the hour 
or the age are as indubitably external to us, and 
as little founded of necessity on freshly perceived 
truth, as any traditions of the past. The danger 
of them lies in their disguise. The single nega- 
tive fact that they make war on some confessed 
tradition prevents us from discovering that they 
too draw their force no less from an authority, 
until it is too late and we have lost or damaged 
that power of independe.nt vision which is but 
braced and harmonised by a known and honoured 
tradition."* Each age has its atmosphere — the 
medium, at once revealing and deceptive, through 
which the children of that age see truth. In 
proportion as the age is a rebel against its pre- 
decessors, that atmosphere is rendered more 
stimulating and also more delusive ; for while, 
on the one hand, it gives a keen edge to thought, 
yet, on the other, it impairs its integrity. We 
think our revolt against conventional theology 
is original to ourselves, whereas in reality it is 
due to our passive and almost unconscious 

* " The Way, the Truth, the Life," pp. 91-2. 
26 



Detachment from the Past 

absorption of the atmosphere of revolt. We 
imagine we are speaking out of our own experi- 
ence, whereas we are merely voicing' our more 
or less unreflective participation in the feeling 
of our age. Its prejudices deflect the course of 
our experience, preventing us from making a 
completely honest and untrammelled venture 
upon the spiritual life. Its antipathies preclude 
our adequate understanding of aspects of ex- 
perience, not in the least alien to us by nature, 
but rendered remote by the atmosphere of an 
age to which they are alien. At every step we 
have to question and sift our own impressions, 
asking how much of them is due to the impact 
of reality upon us, and how much to prepossessions 
derived from the age we live in. And never need 
we interrogate our experience more searchingly 
than when we are conscious of entire freedom. 
Our search is not for a pleasant or plausible 
theory of certain appearances — for a comforting 
and medicinal explanation of what goes on in 
our souls— but for truth ; and truth is always 
compelling. It does not offer itself to our free 
and easy choice : it is *' never that which we 
choose to believe, but always that which we are 
under a necessity to believe.'' * 

It is from the entanglement and confusion of 
our delusive contemporary atmosphere, with its 
fatal effect upon our power of discerning truth, 
that a right study of the past will dehver us. 

* Ibid., p. 93- . 

27 



Christianity in the New Age 

In its mirror bastard traditions are readily dis- 
cerned, old things masquerading as new are seen 
stripped of their modern trappings, and, what 
is most important of all, that which is really 
new — the genuine and authentic contribution of 
our age to religious thought — is liberated from 
obscuring factors and shown in its true bearings 
and potencies. Under the disciplinary pressure 
of the great thoughts of the past, our own char- 
acteristic insight into truth disentangles itself 
from its occasional and ephemeral setting and 
fructifies apace. For the insight of the moment 
can only fructify as it is related to the whole 
coherent field of thought throughout the ages, 
and the unhistoric mind is always the limited, 
the uncatholic, mind, no matter though it speak 
the language of advanced liberalism. If we take 
the thought of one age only for our province, we 
must not expect to be anything but provincial 
in our thinking. Nor will it mend matters if 
we study the past merely in order to discover 
how much of its thought we may conscientiously 
cast on the scrap-heap, and not rather in order 
to elicit its meaning and significance for to-day. 
The right study of the past involves an unfailing 
patience, a scrupulous candour ; above all, a 
profound humility that belongs to ripe spiritual 
culture. It is not easy, but it is worth while — 
supremely worth while for those who are not 
professional theologians, but who as preachers 
and teachers are in peculiar peril of allowing a 

28 



Detachment from the Past 

barren revolt against fallen theological idols to 
absolve them from the task of patient recon- 
struction, and are ever tempted by popular 
demands to put a superficial effectiveness in the 
place of vital truth. On the lower level, the 
cultivation of the historian* s temper will save 
us again and again from the controversial 
infirmity known as '' whipping a dead cat" ; on 
the higher, it will help to shape in us that power 
of apprehending truth which is a fundamental 
condition of spiritual leadership. 



29 



CHAPTER II 

THE SNARE OF PESSIMISM 



A TENDENCY to pessimism is the haunting beset- 
ment of thoughtful minds. It is the creeping 
paralysis of the Church, and her imminent 
peril in a day such as this. One is aware, of 
course, that optimism rather than pessimism is 
the rule in some quarters to-day. The selfless 
heroism of our soldiers and sailors, the spirit of 
comradeshipand sacrifice which has invaded all 
classes of society, and the note of spiritual wist- 
fulness often found in the least likely places 
are construed by some as nothing less than 
the conversion of the Empife to the spirit of 
Christ. But on the whole an atmosphere of 
gloom prevails among thoughtful Christian people. 
The apocalypse of greed, treachery and cruelty 
which Germany has shown to the world, and 
the growing disregard of moral laws and sanctions 
among our own people, combine to alarm us. 
We are confronted with a world largely fallen from 
standards of scrupulous honesty and stainless 
honour ; a world in which reverence, sensitiveness, 
and true chivalry are rare even among the educated 

35 



The Snare of Pessimism 

classes — indeed, one is sometimes tempted to 
say, rarer among the educated classes than 
among simple folk. Once more we believe 
in evil, in sin. We have seen the devil, and 
our eyes are darkened. We do not deny the 
splendid revelations of undreamed-of potencies 
for good which the war has brought us ; but they 
seem brief meteoric flashes beside the solid lump 
of apathy, selfishness and dishonesty that obtrudes 
at every turn in the level walks of everyday life. 

That it is growing increasingly hard to get 
the people inside the Churches, need not unduly 
alarm us in itself ; but taken in conjunction 
with the fact that every educational and ethical 
movement which does not appeal more or less 
directly to self-interest or to the commercial 
instincts has an equally decreasing hold upon 
our people, it becomes gravely symptomatic. 
The scope of education is tending to be more 
and more narrowed by technical aims, and dis- 
interested, non-academic courses of study, such 
as those held under the auspices of the University 
Extension Movement, or the Home Reading 
Union, make a very slight appeal. 

One holds no brief for Victorian amateur 
aestheticism and literary posing. It is quite 
true that much of the old interest in art and 
literature was artificial, and that its decline is 
partly due to a reaction in favour of reality. 
The young lady of leisure who could not under- 
stand how anyone could live without belon-ging 

31 



Christianity in the New Age 

to a Browning society and joining a Pre-Raphaelite 
circle is not greatly to be regretted. But while, 
in many sections of society, these studies were 
no more than a fashionable cult and an irritating 
pose, there were thousands upon thousands of 
sincere, unpretentious people who pursued them 
in an attitude of pure disinterestedness and from 
a genuinely spiritual impulse. That such an 
impulse is even half as common to-day, few would 
care to assert. Say, if you will, that the old 
literary and humanitarian ideals have crumbled at 
the touch of reality. That may be entirely true ; 
but it does not touch our contention that we lack 
the disinterestedness and the spiritual impulse to 
create new ideals more in consonance with reality. 
And if indeed the revival of the corporate con- 
sciousness is creating a new altruism, this does not 
make up for the lack of the spiritual motive power 
which alone can direct it into fruitful paths. 

Now all this is not pessimism; it is merely 
looking facts in the face. Pessimism supervenes 
when we construe these facts as a fresh demon- 
stration of the utter bankruptcy of human nature. 
And it need not surprise us to find pessimism 
once more in the ascendant to-day. A pessimistic 
outlook is bound to be the besetting temptation 
of all who have sufficient clarity of vision to see 
the facile optimism of five years ago as it appears 
in the grim, remorseless light which the war has 
shed upon the roseate view of life that preceded 
it. One need only open pre-war volumes of 

32 



The Snare of Pessimism 

theological and philosophical Reviews in order to 
realise to how large an extent even the most 
thoughtful lived in a fool's paradise, and how 
inevitable therefore the present reaction is. Tak- 
ing an instance at random, we find an accomplished 
writer in an American periodical making severe 
strictures upon the Christian askesis which bids 
us destroy the offending member rather than 
fail of the true life : — 

To be sure, if one is so badly born as that, he has 

no other resource. But normal, ordinary people have 

no such difficulties with their eyes or other members as 

this. . . . Paul, struggling and praying to be 

delivered from his ' ' body of death," is exceptional. He 

is not a type. We may praise him, but we are misled by 

him if we fall into his way of thinking of the good life 

as a fight. The Platonic conception of our moral task 

as consisting essentially, not in an internecine civil war 

in our members, but in an intelligent organisation of the 

many elements of our richly endowed nature, is much 

more rational and wholesome. Ideal goodness is simply 

the amplest expression of human nature. . . . And 

the Platonic view is not only truer to the experience of 

twentieth-century Americans than the militant and 

ascetic view mth which we are so familiar, but it is more 

in accord with the general conception we are coming to 

have of civilisation. The old times, when men had to 

fight for their lives against savage beasts, and still mora 

savage men, are passing. More and more the life of 

civilised men is actually becoming a vast co-operative, 

constructive activity.* 

* Dr. G. R. Dodson, in the Harvard Theological Review, 
January, 191 3. 

D 33 



Christianity in the New Age 

Such a passage as this may be viewed in two 
different ways by the present-day pessimist, 
according as his view of the situation is shallower 
or deeper. He may tell us that it proves how 
sadly we have degenerated from our pre-war 
idealism, since no writer in his senses would 
describe civilised life in such terms to-day. Or 
he may argue — and with far more justification — 
that the war has revealed how false such optimistic 
judgments were at any time. The good life is 
a fight. Men always carry the enemy within 
themselves. War at its worst may be a more 
hopeful thing than the bland, cultured, unscru- 
pulous fight for wealth that marked American 
life in days of peace, concealing the passions of 
sheer savagery behind a cold and calculating 
exterior. Human nature has always been a 
tragic quantity — its fitful and obscure impulse 
towards good overridden by an innate bias 
towards evil, its high resolves betrayed by weak- 
ness where they were not beaten to earth by 
base lusts, its achievements ambiguous, its 
progress illusory. War has not brought a sudden 
accretion of evil ; it has merely unveiled the evil 
that lay latent through long years of ease and 
opulence, overlaid by social amenities and by 
those traditions of decency which have always 
gone to veil the ugly things of life from our pur- 
blind eyes. 

That this second view is the truer and deeper, 
few would care to question. Long years of ease 

34 



The Snare of Pessimism 

and opulence have indeed blinded our eyes to 
the facts. While the blatant luxury, the un- 
scrupulous mammonism, and the naked mate- 
rialism of the age before the war did not escape 
our judgment, we were, on the whole, lamentably 
insensitive to the smug and demure selfishness, 
the polite refusal of every heroic demand, the 
unformulated and often unconscious materialism 
which underlay the smooth, unostentatious, strictly 
respectable lives of middle-class folk, who held 
the luxuries and vices of the class above them 
in righteous abhorrence. Nor did we fathom the 
paganism which animated our social and industrial 
system — a paganism with every hideous possibility 
both of cynicism and savagery. Small wonder 
that our sudden discovery that the devil was not 
dead delivered us over to pessimism ! Yet pessi- 
mism is always an enemy more to be feared than 
the most puerile of roseate delusions. From a 
groundless optimism there is a straight though 
hard road through disillusionment to sober think- 
ing ; but there is no such straight road back 
from pessimism to sanity. Optimism, however 
little foothold it may have in present actuality, 
always has some hold upon reality. It anticipates 
things to come ; it always looks upon truth, 
though it be obliquely and through a deceptive 
medium. But to surrender to pessimism means 
never to see the face of truth again until the soul 
is cured of its distemper. The pessimist cannot 
see things as they are, for he has put the light out. 

35 



Christianity in the New Age 

And pessimism is never so dangerous as when 
it seeks an escape from its own conclusions. As 
long as it contents itself with the investigation 
of problems and conditions, it exercises a salutary 
corrective function, and we could ill spare the 
illuminating force of its ruthless and sombre 
diagnosis. It is when pessimism forgets its own 
creed and applies itself to therapeutics that we 
have cause to fear ; for nowhere is it truer that 
the cure may be worse than the disease. 



II 

The pessimism of religious people has always 
been of a twofold nature, and given birth to one 
or other of two distinct theories of the Church, 
or the Christian Society. There has always been 
a pessimism concerning the state of the world 
which, in the case of Christian souJs, often led 
to a revived hope in the Church, and a pessimism 
regarding the state of the Church which often 
looked hopefully to the world as the theatre of 
the Spirit's operations. (Of the deeper pessimism, 
which includes both Church and world in its 
condemnation, it is not necessary to speak here.) 
The first of these two types of pessimism has 
given rise to two distinct attitudes, both of which 
are with us to-day. 

On the one hand, earnest minds are craving 
for a spiritual society whose strength shall be, 

36 



The Snare of Pessimism 

not in its numbers, but in the purity, sincerity, 
and whole-hearted consecration of its member- 
ship ; whose weapons of warfare shall not be 
the carnal ones of external organisation and 
statecraft, but the armoury of the Spirit ; — a 
Church, in short, of the primitive and Apostolic 
type, owing nothing to worldly prestige and 
influence, and disdaining all adventitious aids 
to impressiveness. Based upon regenerated per- 
sonality, such a Church would never seek to 
attract the curious public, or sacrifice the sanctity 
and freedom of the individual to institutional 
ends. Its only machinery would be the quiet 
word of witness, the systematic teaching of 
truth, and the unostentatious social service that 
needs no advertising or spectacular propaganda ; 
its only mission to bear witness to the things of 
the Spirit, that it might call out from the world 
those in whose hearts the same Spirit had already 
spoken His impelling word. Such a Church 
would remain numerically small, attracting only 
an elect minority — the few '' chosen" among the 
many *' called.'' 

This ideal is far more common to-day than 
is generally supposed. Many earnest spirits out- 
side the pale of -organised Christianity secretly 
cherish the dream of a pure and holy Family 
of God, of which the actual seems an intolerable 
travesty. And within the Church also the demand 
for a true Body of Christ, separated from the 
world — ^nay, uncompromisingly opposed to it — 

37 



Christianity in the New Age 

is once more becoming articulate. Her best 
sons recognise that her weakness is due to her 
increasing worldhness of temper and outlook, to 
her dishonouring alliances with the very powers 
she is pledged to combat. They see her bartering 
her birthright of spiritual triumph for the empty 
promise of a spectacular success, losing her soul 
and not even gaining the world in exchange. And 
the remedy suggested is a stern pruning of her 
membership, and a return to the intransigent 
attitude which characterised her in her earliest 
days. 

That remedy is a counsel of despair, and has 
proved itself to be that throughout the Church's 
history. Churches and sects that have restricted 
their membership to those who profess to have 
passed through a certain rehgious experience, 
segregating themselves from the intellectual and 
social currents of their age, and regarding the 
masses outside their membership as separated 
from them by a gulf which only a cataclysmic act 
of God can bridge, have failed even to realise 
the limited ideal of a saintly community. They 
have invariably and inevitably opened a wide 
door to hypocrisy and self-deception, marred 
genuine saintliness by a censorious, grudging 
spirit, and incurred the final fate of all societies 
founded on pessimism, a jaundiced view of what 
is undoubtedly one aspect of the truth betraying 
them into disintegrating fanaticisms and puer- 
ilities. They have always attracted the very 

38 



The Snare of Pessimism 

people they were designed to exclude — the false 
*' professors/' whom they rightly judge to be 
more dangerous than worldlings — and died of 
internal dissolution. No such Church can stand 
in the long run, because it is founded upon a 
perversion. The contention of religious pessi- 
mism that the world is given over to evil, that 
the Church is the only ark of refuge, and that 
Church and world have as little in common as 
Christ and Belial, has no foundation in reality. 
There is a world-principle, a worldly spirit and 
temper, a carnal mind, and a ''body of death" 
against which the Church is sent to wage unceasing 
warfare — such is the familiar truth of which the 
theory of an intransigent Church is the pessi- 
mistic perversion. But there is also a world 
which God loves, a world in which His Spirit is 
working in ways too manifold and subtle to be 
distinguished by the impatient eye of the cen- 
sorious sectarian ; and since that is so, the 
Church cannot afford to be on intransigent 
terms with it. She cannot ignore or despise it 
without disloyalty to her Lord ; she cannot 
withdraw herself from its intellectual and social 
struggles without calling that common which 
God has cleansed. She cannot disclaim her 
responsibility for those without her pale — a re- 
sponsibility resting, not upon her superiority 
to them, but upon her kinship with them — without 
doing despite to the image of God in man. To 
her witness, the witness of the Spirit in the world 

39 



Christianity in the New Age 

is a necessary complement and answer. While 
speaking with an authority derived from her 
Lord Himself, she must also listen to that same 
Lord as He speaks with many voices in the 
world to which she brings His most effectual 
Word. To take these voices humbly and rever- 
ently into account is but to acknowledge that 
Christ always goes in advance of His heralds ; 
it is but to recognise the prepared soil that the 
seed may be the more effectual. 

The thought of a pure and stainless Church, 
holy, harmless, and undefiled in the midst of a 
wicked and perverse generation, will never lose 
its hold upon aspiring souls, for it is entirely 
valid ; but its translation into terms of an ex- 
clusive sect is doomed to failure. Pessimism 
here is a fatal insensitiveness to the hidden hand 
of Christ in the world. Wherever the working 
of that Hand is ignored or denied in the alleged 
interests of a pure Church, there the Gospel is 
obscured and the Holy One of Israel Umited. 
Such a Church carries the seeds of death within 
itself. For, in the last resort, a Church lives 
by its message — using that term, not in the 
narrow sense of a verbal proclamation merely, 
but including in it the total witness of its life 
and work — and the message of an intransigent 
Church is a fugitive, cloistered, anaemic thing. 
Like Bel and Nebo of old, its religion has to 
be laboriously carried, instead of endowing the 
soul with wings ; shielded, where it should be 

40 



The Snare of Pessimism 

an impregnable armour. It reminds us of certain 
pictures of the Flight into Egypt, dear to our 
early days. They show the grim, perilous wilder- 
ness, with a bird of prey hovering like a spot of 
gold in the merciless blue, and across it, hurrying 
as fast as their burden would let them, Mary 
and Joseph with the Child. Mary's mother- 
agony is in her eyes ; the strain of bitter anxiety 
furrows the brow of Joseph. The next picture 
shows them entering a city. Passers-by stop 
to look at the sleeping Boy, and the Mother's 
eyes reflect a spasm of apprehension. She hugs 
the Child close with an almost desperate grip. 
The sword has entered her heart. In the streets 
of Heliopolis she sees — a Cross. Which things 
are a parable of every Church that takes a pessi- 
mistic view of its mission. To surround our 
faith, our creed, our life with a becalmed and 
relaxing atmosphere of seclusion and timidity 
is to deplete salt of its savour and light of its 
illuminating power, to withhold seed from the 
soil and leaven from the lump. The religion 
of Jesus Christ is not made for seminaries and 
spiritual coteries ; its field is the world, and 
to narrow that field by one furrow is to rob our 
Lord. It is meant to take its chance against 
hostile forces as the sunlight against disease. 
It is equally at home in the gaiety of a village 
wedding and in the rough-and-tumble of the 
market-place. It is not afraid of discussion, 
asks and answers questions, and finds its most 

41 



Christianity in the New Age 

congenial sphere wherever men burst the shackles 
of religious and social conventions and take big 
risks. The Church that tries to confine it within 
the valetudinarian circle of its elect, and to 
force it into the mould of a narrow and Pharisaical 
conception of life, will always find itself in the 
end hugging an empty shell. 



Ill 

In contrast to this conception, yet akin to it 
because springin-^ from the same root, is what 
may be called the Roman ideal of the Church — 
an ideal which has a perennial attraction for 
weary and disillusionised spirits, and never more 
so than in times of change and upheaval. It 
offers a Church, separate indeed from the world, 
and very proudly and irreconcilably separate, 
but by no means content to be '' lightly by the 
world esteemed." On the contrary, its aim is 
to set over against the State an organisation even 
more massive and compelling, to stir the public 
imagination where it cannot rule the public 
conscience, and to impress those whom it fails 
to convince. In its extreme Ultramontane form, 
it lives by domination and coercion. Claiming 
to be conterminous with the Kingdom of God, 
it counts the whole realm of intellectual achieve- 
ment its own, seeks to impose its laws upon the 
nations, and to shape secular policy and use 

42 



The Snare of Pessimism 

secular power for its own ends. It constitutes 
itself the final court of appeal for the State as 
well as the soul, controls education, creates and 
directs public opinion, sets its mark of owner- 
ship upon every movement that can in any way 
further its ends, and directs the weapons of 
popular prejudice and superstition against any 
movement that seeks other ends, using men and 
nations alike as pawns in its great game. It 
is an imposing conception, whose fascination 
will not wane so long as men grow impatient 
with the amazing slowness and gentleness of 
God, and look for a Kingdom '' made with hands." 
It is not confined to Rome, but operates wherever 
a Church, whether Established or Free, puts its 
trust in authority and organisation, recognises 
no interests except its own, relies upon a spec- 
tacular programme, and prefers outward unity 
of creed and action to the free Fellowship of the 
Redeemed. Nor is it the unscrupulous ambition 
and un-Christlike temper of many of its leading 
representatives that constitute the danger of 
such an ideal. The gentlest and most reasonable 
application of its principles and methods cannot 
alter its fundamental opposition to the principles 
and methods of Christ. 

And while it is the ideal of a conquering Church, 
it is as pessimistic in essence as the ideal of a 
despised society of saints. It was indeed cradled 
in pessimism. When, in a.d. 410, the gradual 
decline of the Roman Empire culminated in the 

43 



Christianity in the New Age 

fall of Rome, despair seized the Church, whose 
leaders already heard the marauding feet of the 
Barbarians approaching the Ark of God. Twenty 
years later, Augustine died while the heathen 
hordes were clamouring at the gates of Hippo. 
During the greater part of these twenty years he 
was occupied in writing his famous " De Civitate 
Dei '' — on the surface a triumph of optimism, in 
reality a classic of Christian pessimism, if such 
a contradiction in terms be permissible — speaking 
with the voice at once of a prophet and of a con- 
structive statesman. The superficial optimism 
of the book is obvious. Unconquerable must 
have been the hope of a man who, amid .the 
crash and ruin of the civilisation that had nurtured 
him, could pen the vision of a City of God planted 
four-square upon the earth — a heavenly civitas 
set up in the midst of hostile world-powers, 
limited by no distinction of race, nationality, 
or culture, comprising the dead as well as the 
living, destined to triumph over the civitas 
hominum. In the midst of experiences which 
might well distract the mind and sicken the 
heart of the strongest, he attempts to justify 
the ways of God to man, in a stupendous treatise 
building up stone by stone a massive philosophy 
of history, conceived with a boldness, breadth, 
and exhaustless energy of thought that leave 
one breathless. To have made such an attempt 
at such a period of the Church's history must 
surely augur a splendid optimism. 

44 



The Snare of Pessimism 

But on a closer view, we realise that it was 
far otherwise. True, the great classic is domin- 
ated by a deathless hope ; but it is the hope of 
the apocalyptic prophet. ''De Civitate Dei'' is, 
at bottom, '' a tract for bad times'' — that, is, a 
work written, not that the bad times may become 
better, but out of the profound conviction that 
they are irredeemably bad. In it world-despair 
seeks to drown itself in Church-consciousness. 
Its City of God is not the inalienable home of 
mankind — its home still, however far it may 
have strayed — but an ark of refuge for such as 
have received the sovereign and occult grace of 
God, that they might seek salvation within its 
walls. Nor was it merely world-despair ; it was 
no less a despair of the Church, in the New Testa- 
ment sense of the term. No teacher of that time 
had a clearer vision of the true Church, the free 
and holy fellowship of believers ; but in trans- 
ferring its prerogatives to the externa communa, 
he virtually surrendered that vision. In that 
transference the Roman ideal lies involved, how- 
ever sharply many of its features may conflict 
with what is most permanently valuable in 
Augustinianism. For both proceed on the as- 
sumption that the world is given over to evil, 
and that a Church which relies solely upon spirit- 
ual means, and seeks to build the Kingdom upon 
the foundations of love, freedom and knowledge, 
is too unaggressive and slow to cope with the 
quick, tough forces that are arrayed against it. 

45 



Christianity in the New Age 

Like its antipode, the conrception of a small, 
elect society, the Roman ideal involves the denial 
of the soul's innate and indelible affiliation to 
God — the Christ within every man — and of the 
Spirit's free working in the world. And the only 
escape from pessimism, the only reconciling 
principle that can save us from the vicious dilemma 
between Church and world, and rescue the Church 
at once from worldliness and from intransigency, 
lies in the realisation of the Light that lighteth 
every man, the Light of the world as well as of 
the Church. The ''New Theology" has brought 
the doctrine of The Christ Within into discredit 
by its shallow juggling with moral values, but 
that fact does not give us any right to ignore 
it ; and we do this now already defunct move- 
ment far too much honour if we allow^ it to drive 
us into the opposite extreme. Christ is in man. 
He is in the world. Therefore the Church cannot 
afford to preserve an attitude of spiritual ex- 
clusiveness, let alone of spiritual arrogance. But 
if Christ is in the human soul and in the world's 
life. He is there, first of all, as He that convicts 
of sin. He is there to set the squI, and the world, 
at war with itself ; to create self-criticism where 
complacency has reigned ; to make the calm of 
self-righteousness into a tempest of remorse, that 
the flower of penitence might spring from the 
storm-cleft soil ; to be the soul's Accuser as 
well as its Hope; the world's tormenting Con- 
science as well as its Inspiration. Once this is 

46 



The Snare of Pessimism 

grasped, the Church's attitude to the world 
becomes clear. By acknowledging the presence 
and influence of its Lord in the world, the Church 
will look upon it, not as a hostile country to be 
attacked by assault, and won by giving no quarter 
to its citizens, but as a field white unto harvest — 
the most hopeful thing that ever gladdened the 
eye of man. By allying itself with its Lord as 
the world's Conscience and Judge, its optimism 
will be saved from shallowness and unreality. 
Its faith in the Christ within man and within 
the world's life, so far from making it tolerant 
of the world's evil and low standards, will inspire 
it with an uncompromising antagonism to worldly 
principles and methods. 



IV 

It is this attitude that is needed to-day, if 
we are not to be betrayed into a sterile and 
disintegrating pessimism. With our sense of sin 
sharpened by the terrible events of our time, we 
are sorely tempted, on the one hand, to religious 
fanaticism, and, on the other, to the thought 
that the Church has failed more completely and 
finally than a world which is already showing the 
stirrings of a new spirit. We have among us 
an increasing number of people who have turned 
their backs upon the Church, not because 
of religious indifference, still less of positive 

47 



Christianity in the New Age 

hostility, but in the conviction that it can no 
longer satisfy the highest spiritual cravings of 
mankind. Many of them have drifted into Theo- 
sophy. New Thought, and similar cults; and 
among them are so many souls of genuine spiritual 
quality and fine capacity that it is worse than 
futile to label them neurotics and cranks. If the 
Church would meet the needs of the best spirits 
among them, it must have done with such counsels 
of despair as either the ideal of a small society 
of elect believers, delimited by doctrinal tests, 
or by conformity to a stereotyped form of spiritual 
experience, or the Roman translation of the 
world's methods into the language of Catholicism. 
Only a Church that at once regards the world as 
the theatre of the Spirit's operation and the site 
of God's growing Kingdom, and challenges it un- 
flinchingly in the name of that Spirit and in the 
interests of that Kingdom, can bring Christ to 
men to-day. 

To such a Church, organised in the name of 
Christ, seeking, not to impress herself upon the 
world, but only to serve the ends of His Kingdom 
and to build that Kingdom with the material 
of His ordering, the test of numbers will not 
apply. It is constituted wherever two or three 
are gathered in Christ's name. It is not exclusive. 
It sets up no external tests, whether of ecclesias- 
tical adherence, which would make it schismatic ; 
or of assent to a creed, which would stamp it as 
sectarian ; or of outward character, which would 

48 



The Snare of Pessimism 

rank it with the Pharisees and Scribes against 
its Master. And though it remains a Church of 
but two or three, it is still the Church Catholic, 
the Church victorious. For it embodies a principle 
of universal application ; it carries within it that 
which will yet attract to itself uncounted multi- 
tudes of the faithful and true, the loyal and loving, 
until the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth 
as the waters cover the sea. 



49 



PART 11 

THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE TO THE 
NEW AGE 



CHAPTER III 

THE CHURCH AS TEACHER 



The sight of Britain awake after long years of 
drugging opulence, with the dust of delusion 
shaken from her eyes, and the joy of sacrifice 
in her heart — of England awake in her young 
men and women, who at one fiery touch have 
cast selfish ease and low contentment from them 
as worn-out rags, and put on the beautiful gar- 
ments of dedication — ^has thrilled our hearts. 
The enemy little thought that we would enter 
the lists against perfidy and oppression. He 
had made sure that we feared him too greatly 
to run the risk, and were too sorely torn by class 
and party strife at home, and too weak in face 
of rebellious elements within the Empire, to be 
able to present a united and unbroken front. 
To-day he knows better. The sense of a great 
and righteous cause overrode at one sweep all 
counsels of ignoble prudence, and united races, 
parties, and classes, which but a few weeks before 
had seemed irreconcilable, into one great brother- 
hood of fighting men. We may say what we 
will, and much needs to be said, about the seamy 

53 



Christianity in the New Age 

places in our national life which the war has 
revealed ; one thing towers above all these un- 
veilings of evil — ^the soul of Britain reborn and 
transfigured. 

And as we ponder this glorious mystery of 
the nation's awaking from sleep, we are tempted 
to contrast with it a Church still too complacent 
and inert. Against the regal background of an 
Empire vowed to the uttermost risk and sacrifice, 
she appears languid, self-centered, unmilitant. 
Instead of unity, we see dismemberment and 
petty rivalry ; instead of brotherhood, a selfish 
individualism ; instead of a great fight, an ex- 
asperating preoccupation with small and theo- 
retical issues. Has the Church no enemy to 
fight, we are tempted to ask, that she can afford 
to let ungenerous competition and party strife 
prevail within her borders ? Has she no great 
cause to stand for, no dynamic motive to unite 
her, no fiery inspiration to goad her to daring ? 
Can the call of Empire accomplish what the call 
of Christ fails to do ? Are the enemies of the 
Empire more real and threatening than the 
Enemy of souls ? Does the blood that drenched 
the fair fields of France speak more compelling 
things than the Blood shed on Calvary ? Since 
the Church has failed to create a spirit of unity, 
brotherhood, and holy militancy, can she not, 
at least, submit to have it kindled within her by 
the example of the Empire ? 

That there is justification for such questions, 

54 



The Church as Teacher 

no one would care to deny ; but the truth they 
embody does not go deep enough. Unity, brother- 
hood, and mihtancy are certainly needed if the 
Church is to represent Christ in the new age ; 
but they are not her primary needs. The re- 
iterative insistence with which preachers and 
writers have dwelt upon her lack of corporate 
life and of the warrior spirit has set sensitive 
souls on edge with a poignant, if inarticulate, 
dissatisfaction and longing ; but no amount of 
urging can avail to change the secondary 
character of things that are secondary. The 
fundamental need of the Church is something 
other and deeper than any or all of these three 
things; and until we recognise the primary, 
our insistence upon the secondary will remain 
little more than a blind demand, expressing a 
genuine need, but utterly impotent to meet it. 
It is our insight into the great primal needs that 
alone can give these derivatives their vital con- 
tent. The Empire was not welded into a great, 
united fighting force by saying, '* Our supreme 
need is unity, brotherhood, and militancy ; go 
to, let us be united and brotherly and militant." 
What united us was the clear recognition of a 
common foe and — what is far more to the point 
— the power of a great ideal. It is not so much 
what we are fighting against as what we are 
fighting for that nerves Britain with a moral and 
spiritual force to which but yesterday she seemed 
a stranger. It is the vision of the Britain that 

55 



Christianity in the New Age 

is to be, of the world as God intended it, that 
unites her sons to-day in bonds purer and stronger 
far than any which the mere consciousness of a 
common foe can forge. Indeed, if we rightly 
measure the malignity of the foe, it is only in the 
light of the ideal against which he has launched 
his forces. 

And this is even more true of the Church. 
Unity, corporateness, and the passion of the 
happy warrior are not self-contained entities 
that can be aimed at for their own sakes. They 
, are of value precisely in proportion to the value 
of the cause or impulse which created them. 
Our enemies were also a united force ; they also 
were resolved to fling their all into the furnace, 
and to fight to the death. If union, comrade- 
ship, and fighting courage were to be coveted 
in themselves, apart from moral values, many 
an association of crooks and criminals could 
give both Church and Empire '' points.'' This 
is sufficiently obvious, yet it needs to be em- 
phasised at a time when these qualities are 
worshipped with so blind a fervour, and when an 
impatient public is saying to the Churches, 
'' Look at the Empire ! Why, in the name of 
religion, can't you show the same spirit ? '' 

The Churches, always too easily reduced to 
an apologetic attitude by popular criticism, have 
taken up the challenge, and are initiating a 
crusade for reunion, the revival of the corporate 
life, and a new programme of spiritual warfare. 

56 



The Church as Teacher 

This crusade is to-day being preached from 
almost every influential pulpit, and cannot fail 
to stir the hearer who has the cause of Christianity 
at heart. But the time has come when we need 
to ask ourselves certain preliminary questions. 
We are bidden to unite ; have we really grasped 
that which we are to unite upon ? We are ex- 
horted to brotherliness ; have we a clear con- 
ception of the basis and characteristic quality 
of Christian brotherhood ? We are called to 
enlist in a holy war ; do we really know, with 
a vital and experimental knowledge, what it is 
that we are to fight for ? These are the merest 
commonplaces, but we have wandered away so 
far from the region of reality to which they 
belong that their very homeliness seems startling. 
We have for so long been urged to unite and 
fight against this and that enemy that we have 
tended to live upon negatives, and forgotten 
that what is of primary importance is not our 
recognition of the enemy, but the vision of our 
Captain. We are constantly being told that 
the Church is too indifferent to moral perils, and 
too little indignant against moral evil. But 
what the Church has first and foremost to be 
alarmed about is not the outbreaks of evil that 
shock society every now and then, but her own 
slender grasp upon the sources of moral renewal, 
her attenuated understanding of the Gospel com- 
mitted to her, and the poverty of her experience 
of Christ. 

57 



Christianity in the New Age 



II 

It comes to this — that the first concern of the 
Church at any and every time must be her 
message. She is not here primarily to fight 
against opposing forces, whether by way of 
defensive or by way of offensive, but to build 
a Kingdom. She is, so to speak, a great colon- 
ising power. Whatever warfare she may have 
to wage — and the true Church is always, to some 
extent, a fighting Church — is only incidental to 
her great constructive mission. The questions 
she needs to ask at every stage, and never more 
stringently than in this day of crisis, are : '' Have 
we grasped the nature of the Kingdom of God ? 
Are we building it with the right materials ? 
Do we really know that for which we stand, and 
do we know it in such a way as to be able to 
interpret it to the mind of the age ? " To insist 
upon this is not to take an intellectualistic view 
of the Church's function : it is rather to demand 
that her faith should be '' full of eyes,*' her love 
radiant with intelligence, her will backed by 
insight, her aspirations informed with a positive 
content. Knowledge of the truth and faithful- 
ness to the truth may be a dry and barren business 
out of all relation to life — ^it entirely depends on 
what is understood by '' truth." The truth we 
are concerned with is also a way and a life. It 
is a truth which demands the most perfect con- 

58 



The Church as Teacher 

currence of the intellect, emotions, and will for 
its apprehension. To know it is to have eternal 
life ; to be faithful to it is life abundant. It 
is intellectual enough to give birth to philosophies 
and theologies which leave the mind breathless 
on the utmost edge of thought ; yet it is too vital 
to be confined within the bounds of any system, 
and can be grasped only in the passionate ex- 
perience of the soul that loves and dares. 

None the less, the understanding has a certain 
inalienable primacy in the Christian conception 
of truth. It does not come first in order of time, 
but it gives that which does come first its full 
content, significance, and power. It makes the 
Gospel — the good news from God — influential 
over the whole area of life and knowledge, where , 
otherwise it would remain a remedial measure for 
moral infirmity, by grasping it as the truth of 
God. The pragmatic conception of things which 
has for nearly a generation impoverished our 
life and crippled our thought has left us all but 
incapable of estimating and using truth. It has 
identified truth with mere theory, and then 
opposed to it the conveniently vague idea of 
*' life." Within the Church it has produced a 
type of fervent personal devotion to Christ 
coupled with not merely ignorance of, but positive 
unconcern as to, the meaning and import of His 
teaching. Whenever an attempt is made to 
advocate a more serious and thoroughgoing 
contemplation of Divine reality, one is met by 

59 



Christianity in the New Age 

the objection that a loving heart is more im- 
portant than a correct intellectual apprehension 
of Christianity, and that the man who does the 
will of God is more highly to be esteemed than 
the man of vision. Such a conception as that 
of being sanctified or hallowed in the truth, 
with all its vital suggestions and implications, 
is largely alien to the prevailing temper. 

Herein is one great cause of the Church's 
present weakness. In our reaction against in- 
tellectualism and the tyranny of the theologian 
in the interests of the spiritual life, we have 
tended to forget that life is everywhere blind 
and inarticulate except as it is lived under the 
power of truth. We lament our lack of '' moral 
and spiritual dynamic," and, as a rule, we mean 
nothing more by the term than a great uprush 
of emotion often resulting in spectacular action. 
What we really and supremely need is the dynamic 
of a clear, steady, spacious vision, and of a dis- 
ciplined, progressive apprehension of the truth. 

Much has been said concerning the astounding 
vagueness and crudeness of the religious con- 
ceptions of the great masses of men outside the 
Churches. The religion of the average English- 
man is still a bald and depressing Deism, which 
under the pressure of anguish either breaks down 
into sheer superstition, or is swamped by the 
returning faith of childhood. But what is far 
more significant is the vagueness and crudeness 
of the conceptions held by large numbers within 

60 



The Church as Teacher 

the Churches. It is not the instruction of those 
outside, but the Christianisation — no other term 
is adequate — of the faith and thought of the 
average Church member that constitutes our 
most immediate problem. Under the grim in- 
quisition of war, the secrets of many hearts have 
been revealed. Sorrow has unlocked lips that 
long kept silence concerning God, and bitter 
perplexity has forced the pent-up doubts of a 
lifetime into the open. On every hand one is 
confronted with tragic eclipses of faith — tragic, 
not on account of the obscuring cloud, but rather 
because of the pathetic fiimsiness of the faith 
thus obscured. The most poignantly significant 
thing about the self-revelations of anguished 
souls that the war has extorted is their unveiling 
of the non-Christian character of the faith of a 
large proportion of Church members. Its slender 
hold on Christian doctrine as distinguished from 
passively or superstitiously accepted dogma, its 
preponderantly sentimental character, and its 
extraordinary ignorance of the implications of the 
Gospel conspire to make it an exceedingly frail 
and brittle thing, vulnerable to the lightest 
touch of contradiction. Beneath a thin crust 
of unthinkingly-accepted Christianity, it presents 
a medley of pagan, Jewish and mediaeval con- 
ceptions. It includes Christ as a piece of theo- 
logical machinery, but owes little to His influence 
as a living Redeemer. The most deep-going 
disillusionment which these days have brought 



Christianity in the New Age 

to religious teachers and leaders is the discovery 
that ideas which they deemed dead and done 
with live on as the material of popular faith, 
and are surprisingly influential even with those 
who have spent all their lives under the teaching 
of the Church. Whatever Deity they really and 
profoundly believe in, as distinct from the Deity 
they pay conventional homage to in church, it 
is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. 

The whole religious situation of to-day is a 
witness to the poverty and shallowness of our 
knowledge of God. Traditional conceptions have 
broken down, and in our reaction against a con- 
ception of Christianity which transformed the 
religion of Redemption into a speculative system, 
our interest has shifted from theology to psy- 
chology. Until, under the pressure of a world- 
tragedy, the question, What is God really like? 
swallowed up all other questions, we were far 
more concerned with the soul than with its 
Creator, and our eager investigations of the 
phenomena of religious experience covered an 
ignorance of, and, one is afraid, an indifference 
to, its Object that are bearing' disastrous fruit. 



Ill 

Nowhere does this come to the surface more 
strikingly than in the place where we least think 
of looking for it — the realm of public worship. 



The Church as Teacher 

Worship, public or private, has largely come to 
be a thin and casual affair, empty alike of in- 
tellectual gravity and spiritual passion ; a salu- 
tary custom, indeed, but not to be mentioned 
in one breath with the obligation to social service. 
Characterised often by sheer slovenliness, it lacks, 
even in its most punctilious observance, the 
fiery edge and constraining beauty of minds 
irradiated by the splendour of truth and hearts 
subdued by Divine mysteries. Seldom does it 
exhibit the wonder of wide-eyed faith ; hardly 
ever does it run up into eternity. It barely 
touches the fringe of life ; its solemnities appear 
trivial beside the grim facts of existence. And 
the root-cause of this impotence is a vague, un- 
informed, shallow conception of God. This 
emerges especially in prayer, where the thought 
of God should exercise its most formative in- 
fluence. Most of our prayers — even in public 
worship — are occupied with our own moods, 
our own needs, whether spiritual or temporal, 
rather than with God. How much of them is 
taken up with self-analysis and self- commiser- 
ation, with the recital of our struggles and the 
formulation of our doubts ! As we pass our 
prayer-life under review, we are shamed by its 
colossal egotism. Man, not God, is in the fore- 
front. With all our talk about '' getting into 
tune with the Infinite," '' practising^the Presence 
of God," or however our theological dialect may 
phrase it, and with all our enlarged conceptions 

6a 



Christianity in the New Age 

of the dignity and wonder of life, we tend to 
make God a purveyor instead of a judge, a means 
instead of an end. 

These strictures seem to suggest the egoistic 
and essentially materialistic tendency of '' New 
Thought,'' which seeks to use spiritual forces 
as a means of gaining material ends; or else 
the crude conception of prayer, so slow to die 
even among intelligent folk, according to which 
we can secure any object on which our heart is 
set, provided only we pray long enough and 
vehemently enough. But what one has in mind is 
a far subtler tendency, and one which has natu- 
ralised itself within the Church to an alarming 
degree — the impulse which uses prayer, both 
vocal and silent, as a means for attaining calm 
of soul, spiritual poise, a sense of mastery over 
life. This cult of power is not new. It is as 
old as Christianity, taking different forms in each 
successive age. And not one of the least sig- 
nificant things about it is that while it is pro- 
moted in the interests of a higher ethic than that 
of the average believer, history has abundantly 
proved that it almost invariably ends in pro- 
ducing a lower ethic. This is not to be wondered 
at, for it is rooted in a false and unworthy thought 
of God. It presupposes a Deity who exists 
mainly for the spiritual self -aggrandisement of 
His creatures ; who is, in feet, the great means 
of their self-culture — one might almost say, the 
apparatus for their religious gymnastics. To 

64 



The Church as Teacher 

urge that the self-enlargement sought is spiritual, 
and that it is coveted for the sake of the world, 
does not mend matters. It is merely a new 
version of the old fallacy that it does not matter 
how a man's wealth is gained, so long as his 
personal tastes are refined, and he contributes 
largely to charity. 

It has been argued that the essentially selfish 
and self-bounded character of much of our worship 
is the fruit of Protestant individualism and in- 
tellectualism. Protestantism, it is urged, has 
so exaggerated the importance of preaching as 
to reduce the devotional element to the level of 
mere '' preliminaries,'* and laid so one-sided an 
emphasis upon the subjective needs of the in- 
dividual as to breed a fatal self-absorption which 
has no eyes for God. The one and only remedy 
for such a perverted religious consciousness is to 
be found in the restoration of the Sacrament to 
its rightful place at the centre of Christian wor- 
ship. We must once more come to know the 
Lord in the breaking of bread. At the heart 
of the Gospel is not the acceptance of a message 
from God, but ,,the self-giving of God ; and we 
appropriate the Gospel, not when we accept a 
doctrine, but when we have communion with 
the broken Body of Christ. 

But while there is a profound truth in this 
view, it offers neither a correct diagnosis nor 
a complete remedy. The fundamental cause of 
our inadequate worship is neither intellectualism. 

1^' 65 



Christianity in the New Age 

nor individualism, though both have contributed 
to its enfeebUng, but simply an inadequate 
thought of God. Worship is adoration and 
devotion, but it does not live by mere adoration 
and devotion ; it feeds and grows upon the 
worshipper's enlarging apprehension of the truth. 
No mere emotional fervour, no blind sacra- 
mental communion, can take the place of a 
mind stretching towards the truth, and thus 
being purified to moral penetration, disciplined 
to intellectual gravity, kindled to spiritual 
splendour. ''No Gospel, no Mass'' is the funda- 
mental axiom of all true worship. Communion 
which is not communion with Him who opens 
all Scriptures and feeds the growing soul of 
discipleship with words of eternal life is shber 
superstition. 

This does not imply, of course, that worship 
is an intellectual exercise, or that the prophetic 
function of the inspired mind is of more account 
than the priestly consecration of the devoted * 
soul. Worship is not vision merely, but self- 
oblation — ^the presenting of body and soul as a 
pure sacrifice. Yet it is the soul's deepening 
insight into truth translated into holy living 
that gives that sacrifice its character and value. 
It is only as penetrated and irradiated by the 
active spiritual intelligence that our self-oblation 
is indeed an offering of our integral and undivided 
personality, and not merely the surface movement 
of emotional surrender. If the Protestant pulpit 

66 



The Church as Teacher 

of to-day* has tended to weaken the devotional 
impulse and to depress worship, it is not because 
it has unduly exalted the function of the intellect 
in religion, but, on the contrary, because it has 
largely failed to give religious feeling a positive 
and coherent content. It has tended to dwell 
upon the minor moods and tenses of religious 
experience, to minister to the temperamental 
impressionism of the age instead of to its spiritual 
needs, to take the idiosyncrasies of the soul too 
seriously and the principles of the Gospel not 
seriously enough. To so large an extent, indeed, 
has the pulpit abdicated its teaching function 
that it is possible for a man to hear one-hundred- 
and-four sermons a year, and yet remain patheti- 
cally ignorant of the great doctrines of Christianity 
in their deeper aspects and implications. When 
James Smetham finds it possible to write, *' I 
know no more intellectually of the truth to-day 
than when I first believed,' ' and to acquiesce 
with entire equanimity in his arrested develop- 
ment, the fact that he was none the less a beautiful 
and devout soul may obscure, but does not lessen 
by one iota, the tragedy of such a confession. 
And whatever may be true of individuals here 
and there, worship on the large scale must either 
harden to formality or soften to blind senti- 

* No doubt the Protestant pulpit of the past was character- 
ised by a dry and intellectualistic orthodoxy, but English Pro- 
testantism remained largely immune from an influence which 
sapped the very life of the Continental Protestant Churches. 

67 



Christianity in the New Age 

mentalism, unless it is nourished by a true and 
e^'xpanding thought of God. 

Moreover, a true conception of God involves 
a due emphasis upon the rights of human per- 
sonality. The weakness of popular Protestant 
teaching is not, as its critics seem to think, that 
it has over-emphasised the claims of personality, 
but that it has laid a disproportionate emphasis 
upon the individual's right to judge for himself, 
and upon his craving for spiritual comfort and 
happiness. The result has been an attitude of 
religious self-obsession — a type of mind that 
accepts nothing which does not minister to its 
emotional craving, and is almost incapable of 
anything like steady reflection upon objective 
reality. Again, the remedy is not a correspond- 
ingly one-sided insistence upon adoration and 
devotion, whether expressed in sacramental 
worship or not, but a truer doctrine of God and 
of human personality in relation to God. It is 
not insignificant that the book dealing with 
religious problems of the hour which pleads 
most insistently for a restoration of the Eucharist 
to its central place in Christian worship, also 
asserts with unqualified emphasis that one great 
reason for the alienation of the masses of men 
from Christianity is due to the failure of the 
Church as a teaching institution. In that volume, 
'' The Church in the Furnace," seventeen Anglican 
chaplains, expressing their minds with whole- 
some frankness, bear cumulative witness to the 

68 



The Church as Teacher 

tragedy of a Church that has ceased to 'teach 
and en^hghten. With Germany to brand it in 
upon our reluctant minds that ideas are not 
harmless arm-chair amusements, but moral dyna- 
mite, dare we doubt any longer that the prophet 
spoke truly when he cried, '' My people are 
destroyed for lack of knowledge." 



IV 

The supreme need of the ministry to-day is 
to recover its teaching function. Two genera- 
tions ago the man in the pew received an aston- 
ishing amount of solid religious instruction from 
the pulpit. We are far too ready to smile at 
the exceeding '' stodginess " of matter and pom- 
posity of manner which characterised this in- 
struction, and to take it for granted that its 
result was merely an intellectual assent having 
no deep influence upon the hearer's life. Both 
these strictures are superficial. What sounds 
tedious and magniloquent to us came with living 
power to the men of an earlier generation, and 
while many aspects of the Gospel — chiefly its 
social implications — ^were not understood by them, 
what was understood exercised a profound in- 
fluence upon life and conduct within its own 
range. We may marvel at the narrowness and 
dogmatism of Victorian religion, but there is 
no foundation whatever for asserting that the 

69 



Christianity in the New Age ' 

Victorian Church member failed '' to live ap to 
his lights.'' On the contrary, everything goes 
to show that the teaching received and assimilated 
by him, however defective, and in some ways 
frankly repellent, entered the very fibre of his 
being, with the result that, in spite of his primness 
and complacency, his demure love of comfort, 
and his exasperating acquiescence in the things 
that are, he lived under the power of his con- 
sciousness of God as many of us do not, and had 
a sense of responsibility and stewardship which 
this age of social enthusiasms curiously lacks. 

To-day we have exhausted the fund of re- 
ligious knowledge which former generations have 
bequeathed to us. The theological terminology 
of a past age has lost its meaning for us ; its 
formulae have, to a considerable extent, ceased 
to be adequate to our understanding of ultimate 
reality. The neatness and finality of its defini- 
tions repel us ; its exclusion of whole tracts .of 
life that we have learnt to think of as sacred 
fills us with amazement. Moreover, in our re- 
vulsion from a barrenly intellectualistic attitude, 
we have come to minimise the importance of a 
teaching ministry. We like to remind ourselves 
that Christianity cannot be taught like arith- 
metic ; that it is a Divine touch, the motion of 
the wind that bloweth where it listeth ; an 
attitude, a life. We do not want to be instructed 
from the pulpit ; we want to be impressed and 
appealed to ; we want the preacher to create an 

70 



The Church as Teacher 

atmosphere, to wield the magic wand of spiritual 
evocation. We do not want so much to under- 
stand as to experience — to feel the touch of God 
upon our souls ; to know, in the region where 
words fail, that we are one with Him. We are 
weary of the exasperating logomachies, the un- 
helpful antiquarian ism of doctrinal discussion. 
We long for movement, colour, dynamic life. 
We are impatient even of the great mystical 
doctrines, for, after all, religion as an intense 
inward experience is not possible to every man ; 
religion in that sense is surely '' a matter of 
temperament, like a taste for music— or for 
mustard.'' But to find God in the rhythm of 
common life, to see Him in the brother whom 
we help and love, to feel His Spirit pulsing through 
the great movements of the age — that is open 
to all. What we need is not professors of theology 
in the pulpit, but prophets of the spiritual im- 
pulse, 'seers who will teach us how to discern 
the Way of God in the ways of contemporary 
history ; mystics, if you will, but practical 
mystics, who will show us the sacramental value 
of Borough Councils and Welfare Committees. 

The truth of all this need not be especially 
emphasised at this late day. Christianity is 
obviously not a theological system, a neat '' plan 
of salvation/' but an experience involving the 
whole personality and revolutionising a man's 
social relations as well as his personal conduct. 
But we do not experience Christianity by simply 

71 



Christianity in the New Age 

stating with reiterative emphasis that it is an 
experience and not a creed, and it sometimes 
looks as if there were less rather than more 
genuine first-hand Christian experience among us 
since we began to concentrate upon '' the religion 
of experience." With all our insistence upon the 
vital character of Christianity, we are not pro- 
ducing a conspicuously large number of vital 
Christian personalities. Our emergence from a 
conventional observance of religion has thinned 
the ranks of our Church membership, but it has 
not made those that remain within the Church 
more whole-heartedly Christian ; on the con- 
trary, our spiritual proletariat has never been 
larger in proportion to our total Church member- 
ship than it is to-day. Every Church can show 
multitudes of excellent men and women open to 
religious impressions, eager to serve along in- 
stitutional lines, always ready to give and help, 
but lacking definite spiritual personality. They 
are most lovable, as a rule ; their immunity from 
priggishness and Pharisaism is a rehef after the 
hardness and self-consciousness of the conven- 
tionally spiritual, and they abound in the most 
hopeful possibilities. But, in their present con- 
dition, they are not spiritual entities ; and 
unless they are helped to their legitimate develop- 
ment, 'they will end in religious sub-normality, 
in chronic minority. 

The reason for this is not far to seek. In 
belittling the need of teaching, we are depriving 

72 



The Church as Teacher 

ourselves of the very factor by which our ex- 
perience of Christianity is hfted above the mists 
of mere feehng. As we have reminded ourselves 
already, experience is little more than an instinct, 
or a fleeting mood, unless reflected upon and 
interpreted by the reason. And further, ex- 
perience presupposes knowledge to a far greater 
extent than we are prepared to admit. It was 
not for nothing that Jesus taught His disciples 
daily for three years before He died and rose 
again ; it is not for nothing that the Holy Spirit 
is conceived of as imparting the things Christ 
has yet to say to His disciples. While experience 
can come, and has come again and again, to 
untaught souls, that articulated body of ex- 
perience which makes the complete man in Christ 
Jesus cannot come in its most vitally influential 
power without a basis of knowledge. Much of 
what we call experience is nothing else than the 
sudden vitalising of latent knowledge mechanic- 
ally absorbed and unconsciously retained. We 
need to realise how much we owe to that un- 
critical and quasi-mechanical acceptance of tra- 
ditional religious knowledge which set us free 
to turn our attention to the new impulses and 
tasks of a later day.* All the time, while we 

* Dr. Hort deals with this point in his classic treatise, " The 
Way, the Truth, the Life," pp. 86-88. The whole chapter is 
pre-eminently worth reading in this connection. Dr. Hort shows 
in inimitable fashion how, in the apprehension of the Gospel as 
truth, an endless future is opened for all knowledge and all 
devotion. 

73 



Christianity in the New Age 

turned from the theological aspect of Christianity 
to enter more deeply into its practical implica- 
tions, we were being unconsciously nourished on 
our inherited store of knowledge. That inherit- 
ance is failing us to-day. And unless we replace 
it by a newly-won intellectual grasp and formu- 
lation of our deepest religious convictions, which 
shall impose upon us a discipline as severe and 
educative as that which traditional forms of 
belief imposed upon our fathers, we shall surely 
lose our souls in the name of freedom. 

The present-day pulpit, where it has been 
alive to the tremendous issues of the hour, has 
tended, to a considerable extent, to substitute 
a ministry of censure for a ministry of teaching. 
Exhortation mingled with reproach has become 
the keynote of preaching in not a few quarters, 
and only too often it reduces itself to a demand 
to make bricks without straw. Thus, for in- 
stance, we are incessantly exhorted to a more 
passionate and adventurous religious attitude. 
If patriotism can evoke so heroic a passion, ought 
not the call of Christ to win at least as intense 
a response ? 

That Christ can indeed kindle the soul to 
a passion beside which the flame of patriot- 
ism pales to a shadow is graven deep iipon the 
Church's records. But as one listens to these 
reiterative demands for spiritual passion, one is 
haunted by the uncomfortable suspicion that 
even the low degree of fervour and zeal found 

74 



The Church as Teacher 

in the Church to-day has not sufficient reality 
behind it, is not sufficiently^ rooted in vital know- 
ledge to justify it as an authentic movement of 
the soul. ^ 

What does the average church-goer really 
know of Christ as One who re-creates the 
soul at its central depth ; to what extent has he 
entered into the purposes of the Kingdom ; what 
grasp has he of the world-wide sweep and the 
intimate workings of redeeming Love that could 
create an increase of genuine passion as distinct 
from mere nervous emotion ? 

It is not theological knowledge that is in 
question here, but the deep pondering of the heart 
that loves. It is Experience in its fullest sense 
that is needed — experience which includes an 
ever-deepening insight into the mind of Christ, 
a feeding of the spiritual intelligence upon His 
words of eternal life. It is this deeper and more 
truly experimental penetration into the secret of 
Christianity that needs to be preached to-day. 
To stir men to their crying need of that grasp 
upon reality which creates passion for Christ's 
cause, and so passion for all great causes, is the 
preacher's task. The mere exhortation to be 
more passionate only serves to obscure this need, 
and in the long run produces an amazing blunt- 
ness and indifference. The pulpit that abdicates 
its teaching function to-day is on the way to 
kill the ideals it most strenuously advocates. 
To teach, in the fullest sense of that term, leading 

75 



Christianity in the New Age 

people into the truth and not merely describing 
the outward vesture of truth ; to teach with the 
combined fearlessness and awe of those who dare 
to trust the Spirit's present guidance, is the only 
salvation of the pulpit. A blind faith that can 
give no account of itself, a rootless emotion that 
fails in the face of grim realities, a mindless en- 
thusiasm for something that remains unknown 
through sheer mental indolence — ^these things 
are fully as disastrous as a conventionally 
accepted theology. The preacher who can teach 
experimentally, i.e., who can present his thought 
as the living product of his own experience, will 
meet with a response that will astonish him. 



NOTE 

Since this chapter was in type, the Archbishops' First 
Committee of Inquiry has issued its Report on " The Teach- 
ing Office of the Church " — a document profoundly significant 
both as a frank confession of failure and as a call to imme- 
diate and radical action. In its insistence upon the in- 
tellectual element in the Church's message, and upon the 
need for presenting that message in terms of current thought, 
it corroborates all that has been said above on this point. 
It specially emphasises the intellectual weakness and defec- 
tive training of the clergy as a primary cause of the Church's 
failure as a teacher ; demands that the training for the 
ministry be made the concern of the Church as a whole, and 
a first charge upon her revenues ; and makes definite practical 

76 



The Church as Teacher 

recommendations towards securing a higher standard of 
ministerial competence. In this emphasis many see the 
most important feature of the Report ; but it should be 
borne in mind that, as a point of fact, some of the Free 
Churches have already a standard of training equal to, and, 
in the case of the Presbyterian Churches, greatly in advance 
of, that suggested in the Committee's recommendations, and 
that yet they too have lost heavily within the last decade. 
After all, our primary concern to-day is with the contents 
of the Church's message rather than with the method of 
conveying it ; and our first task is to determine afresh what 
that message really is, to re-think it in the light of a new 
day, and to re-appropriate it experimentally. 

It is when the Committee turns its attention to theo- 
logical reconstruction that its utterances seem to us of prime 
importance. In dealing with the question of " Examination 
for Ordination " they pass the present Examination Syllabus 
under stringent review. They point out that the Thirty-nine 
Articles, which, with the Creeds, form the subject-matter of 
the present examination in theology, have nothing to say 
concerning " the great truths of the Divine Fatherhood, of 
God's immanence and transcendence, of His eternal purpose 
for the world, and of the Kingdom for whose establishment 
He calls us to cooperate with Him." They begin with the 
doctrine of Original Sin ; of the fact of actual sin they have 
little to say ; of man's original glorious nature in the image 
of God, nothing. They reveal nothing of the mind and heart 
of God towards us, reducing the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ to " a kind of moral connoisseur." The result is, as 
one clergyman put it, that " there are a good many people 
who believe in the Blessed Sacrament, but do not believe 
in Almighty God." The Report also lays emphasis upon 
the neglect of the subject of Christian morals — a neglect 
easily accounted for by the Church's weak grasp upon the 

11 



Christianity in the New Age 

doctrines upon which Christian morals are based. It reminds 
us that the attack upon Christianity is to-day passing from 
doctrine to morals, and that " while such old standard books 
as Pearson's " Exposition of the Creed," and Nelson's " Fasts 
and Festivals," made a real effort to exhibit the moral 
bearings of Christian truth; those which have taken their 
place do not." The whole Report is one powerful, cumu- 
lative, convincing plea for that new thought of God with 
which Chapter IV. of this book attempts to deal. 



78 



CHAPTER IV 

The Need for a New Thought of God 



Behind the languor of present-day religious life 
is the lack of a new thought of God — a profound, 
creative conception that shall weld our fragmen- 
tary ebcperience into a coherent and intelligible 
whole. That new e'xperience has been granted 
us we dare not doubt. We have touched God at 
points at which a former generation would have 
deemed it impious to look for Him, gained in- 
sights into His purposes which re-created our 
world and gave a new spaciousness to life, realised 
our corporate relation to Him as the ages of 
individualism could not do. Yet, with all this 
spiritual wealth, we lack a deep, true thought 
of God ; and the reason is not far to seek. While 
we are eager to touch life at every point, while 
large numbers are anxious to make contact with 
that spiritual world of which they are increasingly 
convinced, we largely lack any intense and 
impelling longing to know God as a Person ; 
to know Him intimately, profoundly, and at 
first-hand ; to apprehend Him as well as to 
feel Him ; to know Him with the understanding 

. 79 



Christianity in the New Age 

and not merely with the reUgious instincts. It 
was this longing which drove men of old, not 
merely to live in the light that shames and purifies, 
but also to think deeply, patiently, yea, passion- 
ately, until out of this interaction of gnosis and 
praxis, this rubbing together of life and action 
out of which all true fire and light proceed, there 
came thoughts of God that moulded the lives of 
Churches and nations and created mighty world- 
movements. 

All through history there have been drab 
and arid periods in which man's longing for God 
grew faint and dim. Between the Reformation 
and the Evangelical Revival there stretched such 
an arid desert ; and when the hand of Wesley 
rekindled fires that had all but died out, it did 
not wholly restore what had been lost. It brought 
back the warm emotion of the heart that cannot 
rest until it has found the eternal Heart of Love ; 
it did not bring back the passion of the mind 
that craves to apprehend the Infinite Mind. In 
its reaction from a rationalistic conception of 
Christianity, it tended to disparage the function 
of reason in man's experience of God. It pro- 
duced great experimentalists — men who spoke 
with authority, as those who knew with a know- 
ledge so immediate and unshakable as to put 
it beyond the pale of argument — ^but it did not 
produce great thinkers. Its roll of honour in- 
cludes no names like those which made the massive 
race of Puritan divines illustrious, no men who 

80 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

were at once speculative thinkers and profound 
psychologists of the Christian experience. It 
may, in fact, be said to mark the starting-point 
of that reaction against intellectualism which, 
especially when in Hegel intellectualism spoke 
its last word, tended to make experience entirely 
emotional and to conceive of thought as divorced 
from life. By the time of Kingsley and Maurice, 
people in general had lost that interest in theo- 
logical thought which gave the Puritan pulpit 
so matchless an opportunity, and theologians 
were, on the whole, strangely devoid of experi- 
mental interest. With Ritschl that interest came 
into its own again ; but Ritschlianism, in fighting 
against a metaphysical theology, opposed to it, 
on the one hand, a philosophical scepticism, and, 
on the other, a narrow and dogmatic historicity 
which could not survive criticism. It had no 
psychology of the Christian experience, and 
calmly relegated the soul's immediate certainties 
to the realm of mysticism, by which was under- 
stood something purely subjective, if not actually 
pathological.. 

For the past fifty years there has been much 
discussion as to the nature of God, but little 
genuine thinking. Popular apologetics has re- 
mained, to a large though decreasing extent, a 
matter of cheap argument and smart retort. 
Men have been more or less interested in God, 
and more or less curious about Him; but of a 
consuming desire to know Him and hold com- 

G 8l 



Christianity in the New Age 

muniou with Him there has been comparatively 
Uttle. Even in religiously - inclined circles, a 
superficial spiritual eagerness conceals a poverty 
of dynamic desire. Everyone wishes to know 
God a little, but few take pains to know Him 
much ; and while spiritual phenomena are eagerly 
investigated, their Source is neglected. The great 
wave of humanism which has captured religious 
souls has shown the inhumanness of certain 
current conceptions of God, the meanness of the 
common idea of divinity as compared to the 
nobility of man. Briefly, our vision has been 
sharpened, and we are becoming adepts at criti- 
cising defective views of God ; but we still lack 
that passion for God, that overmastering sense 
of our need of Him and our affiliation to Him, 
which will drive us to re-think our conception 
of Him with all the energy of brain and soul of 
which we are capable. 

We have seen how in our very acts of worship 
our lack of real contact with God is apparent, 
how even the most spiritual are dogged by the 
temptation to make God the means and their 
perfecting the end. There is no escape from 
this except by sinking ever more deeply into 
the thought of God. We must at all costs have 
a God who so smites us with a sense of His majesty, 
beauty, and surpassing wonder, that, so far from 
presuming to use Him, we shall scarcely dare 
ask Him to use us. We need a God who so loves 
men, and so sorrows with and suffers for them, 

83 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

that at the sight of such love our selfishness 
dies within us, and even the thought of our most 
spiritual self is lost in a consuming desire to 
give Him love for love. We need a God whose 
purposes towards ourselves and the world are so 
stupendous that, as we iDegin to apprehend some- 
thing of their length and breadth and depth 
and height, we tread our own small plans — even 
our plans for the good of others — ^under foot, 
and humbly offer ourselves to Him for the build- 
ing of His Kingdom. We need, in short, a God 
who possesses and masters us. And if our thought 
of God is so to possess and sway our deepest 
heart, it must be beaten out on the anvil of the 
mind. No swiftness of insight or leaping flame 
of emotion can absolve the intellect from its 
task. We need a conception of God as philo- 
sophic as that of the Greek Fathers, as mighty 
as that of the Reformers and Puritans, and as 
ethically searching as a new social consciousness 
can make it. 



II 

How are we to arrive at such a conception ? 
Already that shallow curiosity about the spiritual 
world which has killed all true thinking is giving 
place here and there to a new wistfulness, and, 
what is more, to a new teachableness. Men are 
far more ready now than they were five years 
ago to listen to the teacher or community that 

83 



Christianity in the New Age 

can give them a new thought of God. What 
liave we to say to them ? Our first step clearly 
must be to disentangle the specifically and funda- 
mentally Christian conception of God from the 
accretions that have gathered round it, and the 
modifications which have improved it out of 
existence. Certain old and v^ry simple lines of 
thought, familiar to some of us since our school- 
days, may serve as a guiding thread through a 
labyrinth of overlapping presentations, and recall 
us to the material out of which a constructive 
conception of God must be built. 

In this old and very effective system of medi- 
tation we were invited to picture an average 
individual — ^just a common, insignificant man or 
woman, without any charm or distinction, and 
with a thousand irritating and unlovely qualities. 
We were told to consider such an individual in 
relation to nature and to the race ; what is he 
but the merest speck upon the landscape, so 
insignificant, so irrelevant, that it takes an effort 
to become aware of his presence at all ? Yet, 
difficult though it be to believe, he is a person 
of fremendous importance. Three stupendous 
facts conspire to give him a dignity which kings 
might envy. To begin with, he is the object of 
his Creator's love— of a love as distinct and in- 
dividual as though he were the only being in the 
universe. God does not merely value him as a 
pawn in the game — 3. cog, small yet indispensable, 
in the machinery of the universe ; He values 

84 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

him as something altogether unique, something 
to be ardently coveted and supremely prized. 
Upon him the Everlasting Love is fastened with 
a brooding tenderness of which the love of a 
lover for his beloved is but a faint shadow. Upon 
him the Eternal Mind is concentrated with a 
solicitude we cannot measure. Not all the respect 
paid to the great ones of earth is comparable for 
a moment to the reverence of the Creator for 
this most poor and commonplace of creatures. 

That is one great fact woven deep into the 
very texture of Christianity ; but there is more 
than that. About this insignificant person there 
is an attraction so powerful that it imposed a 
law of gravitation upon Heaven, and drew 
Eternal Love down to itself. The hidden poten- 
tialities of that frail, unsteady, wayward human 
heart, the unseen beauty of that warped and 
blemished soul, were as fuel of fire to the burning 
heart of the Saviour. He was created for Jesus, 
predestinated to the splendour of the hidden 
life in Christ ; and thus his weakness and need 
knocked irresistibly upon the door of Heaven, 
and helped" to transfigure the earth with the 
glorious mystery of the Incarnation. He lives 
in a redeemed world. The discriminative love 
of Jesus has flung its dewy splendour about his 
sordidness ; the eye of Jesus has looked upon 
him till his own eye reflects a faint shadow of 
that look ; the hand of Jesus has touched him 
and left a trail of glory where it rested. 

85 



Christianity in the New Age 

And yet a third lustre wraps him round. 
If Christianity is true, then the God who so 
wondrously made him, and who is waiting to 
remake him yet more wondrously, has a distinct 
intentfon and plan for him. He has an inalien- 
able place in the mighty purposes of Heaven. 
As an individual, a citizen, a member of the 
Body of Christ, there is a work for him to do 
which no other man, nor all men taken together, 
can do. It is his peculiar dignity, his only 
happiness, to give to God a love and a worship 
which no other can give -should he refuse it. 
In creating him, God gave him his own share 
in the eternal destiny; who dare set a limit to 
the momentous interests extending far beyond 
the scope of his individual life which depend upon 
his free self-dedication to his Creator ? And as 
on earth he has his own unique work and value 
for God, so he has his own place in the life beyond. 
For him there waits, if he be true to his divine 
calling, a crown of individual splendour and 
characteristic loveliness, destined to make its 
own irreplaceable contribution to the glory of the 
City of God. i . . 

These are tremendous assumptions, and it 
takes a tremendous faith to preach them ; yet 
they belong to the essence of the Christian Gospel, 
and to weaken them by one iota is to fail of our 
trust. We are ashamed to think how largely 
we have failed in this matter. A meretricious 
apologetic and a spurious liberalism — ^now finally 

86 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

vanished, one would hope, in the shaking of things 
that can be shaken — ^have betrayed us into preach- 
ing Christianity as if it ware merely a sympathetic 
and . religious way of expressing the moral and 
social ideals of the best thinkers. But we are 
once more coming to see that the Christian 
Gospel, while it is the source of all these ideals, 
is something other than they, and that its great 
differentiating factor is simply the love of God 
to men. The Christian doctrine that God loves 
us and desires our love is not a figure of speech 
— a romantic version of the thesis that God 
cares for the race, appreciates each individual 
as a contributing factor in its development, and 
makes certain ethical demands upon him. It 
means precisely what it says. It announces in 
the face of a thousand screaming contradictions 
that God loves men and expects men to believe 
it. And once a man does believe it, he may 
succeed in getting rid of the miraculous, but he 
will not be likely to object to it on the score of 
its difficulty. Beside the one stupendous doctrine 
of the love of God all other doctrines appear 
credible. What can be more simple and ele- 
mentary, what more sublime and regenerative, 
than a childlike faith in the loving fatherhood 
of God ? Yet the moment we say the great 
words, God is love, with meaning and intensity, 
we find ourselves caught in a grim conflict of soul, 
compared to which our dogmatic difficulties are 
mere child's-play. 

87 



Christianity in the New Age 

Here, then, is the centre, the inmost heart, 
of the Christian conception of God. There are 
many forms of heterodoxy, but there is ultimately 
only one heresy — ^the weakening or denial of the 
doctrine of the love of God. To re- think our 
thought of God must therefore mean, first and 
foremost, to sink more deeply into that doctrine, 
and to ^realise more clearly its tremendous im- 
plications. What does it mean in ^the light of 
our deepest religious experience? How does it 
present itself when we have exercised our best 
intelligence upon it ? How can we best restate 
it in consonance with present-day needs, and in 
forms most readily assimilated by the mind of 
to-day ? This is not an abstract intellectual 
exeircise, but a most uncomfortably practical 
inquiry. One need not ponder this great doctrine 
very long or deeply before coming to the melan- 
choly conviction that the Church's corporate life 
and organisation are not based upon a profound, 
unequivocal faith in the love of God, but, on the 
contrary, upon a compromise between that doc- 
trine and the world's scale of values which is 
more fatal by far than its direct negation. One 
need only think of the fact that, as a pungent 
critic phrased it, '' there is more grief in Church 
circles over one rich man that departeth than 
over ninety-and-nine poor persons who never 
come near the Church," in order to realise the 
force of this assertion. Nor need we imagine 
that the preaching of what is called a social 

88 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

doctrine will mend matters. The social doctrine 
promulgated by Trades Unionists is sufficiently 
democratic ; yet Trades Unions, as one knows 
them, are not one whit ahead of the Churches 
in adopting a hospitable and understanding atti- 
tude towards the classes not included in their 
membership, whether it be the capitalist class 
or the ranks of casual labour. If the truth were 
told, they are several degrees more class-con- 
scious and exclusive than even the most com- 
placent Churches. There is only one thing that 
can save the Church of Christ from its entangle- 
ment with anti-social interests — a new thought 
of God as loving men with a love so individual 
and compassionate that beside it a mother's love 
shows rough edges, and so exacting that the 
meticulous discipline of Christian monk or Hindu 
ascetic seems poor and trivial beside the strength 
of its consuming fire, the rigour of its inexorable 
inquisition. To think through this conception 
till its remotest implications become apparent 
and compelling is the Christian teacher's first 
duty. 



Ill 

To say that our supreme need is to think of God 
in terms of Jesus Christ and His Cross is to utter 
one of those commonplaces of Christian teaching 
which we took for granted, until the war revealed 
the fact that it had never been really accepted 

89 



Christianity in the New Age 

by the great mass of Christian people. When 
anguished souls cried out that they could no longer 
believe in a God who permits such a hell of cruelty 
and slaughter, they were implying a doctrine. of 
the Divine Omnipotence expressed in terms of 
nature and brute force, not in terms of love and 
grace. The popular doctrine of God is theistic 
(where it is not crassly deistic) rather than 
Christian ; it does not go to Jesus for its definition 
of omnipotence. The average man, even where 
he refuses to admit it, conceives of the Incarnation 
as a suspension of God's omnipotence in favour 
of His love. He believes in the omnipotence of 
love on the human plane, and after a sentimental 
fashion. He believes it may triumph in the 
realm of family affection, but cannot conceive 
of its application to the life of nations. He 
admits it to be the strength of a mother's heart, 
but assumes it to be something of an amiable 
weakness in God. He has yet to learn that the 
only doctrine of God's omnipotence that is tenable 
in face of life's grim realities finds expression in 
Christ. In Him we see God giving up His well- 
beloved Son to a life of suffering and a death of 
shame, not in spite of His omnipotence, but 
because He is omnipotent with the omnipotence 
of love that can suffer to the death and still 
remain love. His is an omnipotence that triumphs 
in endurance, subjugates men by suffering dumbly 
at their hands, and delivers its own by sharing 
their afflictions. How many of the distracting 

90 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

doubts born of a desperate world-situation would 
survive if we defined the power of God in 
terms of Jesus ? It is surely significant that, 
with the exception of one brilliant attempt,* re- 
cent theological thought has given us little help 
towards the restatement of the Christian doctrine 
of Divine Omnipotence, and popular preaching 
still largely proceeds upon a conception of God's 
power which defines it in terms of material force 
plus will, making His love a separable addendum 
to it instead of its very essence. 

But to re-think our thought of God in terms 
of Jesus Christ means to re-think it in terms of 
the Cross. It is one of the most hopeful signs 
of the times that we are at last realising that 
the reality of the Cross does not stand or fall 
with any given theology ; that neither evangelical 
sentimentalities, nor modernist evaporations, 
nor forensic ossifications can avail to blunt its 
challenge or weaken its attraction. When they 
have spoken their last word, the Cross still waits 
at the turning-point of man's pilgrimage. All 
ways of approach lead to it ; all lines of argu- 
ment converge upon it ; every deep instinct of 
the soul is drawn to it. Theologies may change 
and institutions perish, but still mankind will 
survey the wondrous Cross on which the Prince 
of Glory died. Coarse and mechanical theories 
of the Atonement may for a time alienate sincere 
and sensitive souls ; but in breaking loose from 

» •* The World's Redemption," by C. E. Rolt. 
91 



Christianity in the New Age 

crude theories they do not leave the Cross behind 
them, for the Cross is stamped upon all art and 
literature, all thought and life. When Roman 
soldiers cast lots for the garments of the Crucified, 
they little dreamt that a whole world would 
clothe its nakedness with these blood-stained 
folds. If we turn our backs on Calvary, it is 
only to find the Cross again in " Mr. Britling's'' 
Essex villa, among Dostoievsky's Russian pris- 
oners, in the pages of the Referee. If we refuse 
to see it in the Mission-field, it meets us in the 
first selfless life we touch. As well try to run 
away from the law of gravitation ! '' The Cross 
is such a thing,'' the late Dr. Denney once 
remarked, '' that even if you bury it, you bury 
it alive.'' * 

To stand at the foot of the Cross, forgetting 
the controversies that have gathered about it 
in the past and thinking only of its vital mean- 
ing for us to-day, is to reaUse the falseness and 
shallowness of our conception of God, and to 
come nearer the core of reality than our recal- 
citrant souls can bear with comfort. In our 
fretting perplexity regarding the ways of God 
with men during the Great War, we were apt to 
console ourselves with the reflection that " the 
world's history is the world's judgment," and 
that in the long run goodness must have its 
reward and wickedness be cursed with defeat. 

* T. H. Walker, " Principal James Denney : A Memoir and 
a Tribute," p. 72. 

92 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

But a look at the Cross suffices to dispel that 
easy confidence. The Cross also says that good- 
ness must triumph in the long run ; but it speaks 
with an accent that shows its seeming corrob- 
oration of our facile optimism to be in reality 
a shattering contradiction. Its " long run " is 
a very long run indeed — so long that the hearts 
of many will wax cold. It speaks of a Love that 
must conquer, a Justice that must prevail ; but 
it is a Love that can see its best-beloved delivered 
to torture and not raise a hand to save him, a 
Justice that can see injustice flaunt its shameless 
victory in the market-place and keep silent. 
It gives us, in short, a new conception of the 
omnipotence of God. We asked Him in bitter 
perplexity why He allowed the earth to be filled 
with cruelty, why a brutalised nation should 
be suffered to wreak its lusts upon the innocent 
and the chivalrous ; and so long as we think of 
God as an omnipotent Being who is also supposed 
to be Love, we shall continue to ask these questions 
with despairing vehemence and find no answer 
to the cry of our souls. But in face of the God 
of Jesus crucified, they die upon our lips. We 
know the answer before we ask them. It is : 
" When did I promise to give My servants such 
a victory as you are thinking of, or to stay brute 
force lest these I love best are hurt ? Not when 
I gave My beloved Son to defeat and death and 
kept My sword in its sheath." 

The Cross does not beUttle our perplexities ; 

93 



Christianity in the New Age 

it shifts their centre of gravity to a profounder 
depth. In the Ught of its stern logic they appear 
shallow and trivial. It meets them, not with an 
answer, but with a counter-challenge, matching 
the paradox of human suffering with the greater 
paradox of a Love that is an inexorable exaction, 
and a Justice whose sword-edge is a terrible 
power of mute endurance. " Can you venture 
upon the depths of such Love ? '* asks the God 
of Jesus. *' Can you take the Cross seriously, 
and still keep an unshaken hope in your heart — 
the hope that lives not only through but by 
disappointment ? '' And to accept that challenge 
is to be born into a new world and to possess 
a new scale of values. To have truly seen the 
Cross and still to think of serving God for any 
reward but the Love that cannot spare us, is an 
incurable moral stupidity. Rather than con- 
tinue to worship a Deity who pays His servants 
in material coin, would we cry out, in face of 
the bitter agony of Him who always did the 
Father's will, that it is a terrible and cruel thing 
to be loved of God. There is a deeper sanity 
in that cry of revolt than in a conception of the 
Divine Omnipotence which would make us pro- 
nounce the Cross an outrage upon the universe, 
had we but the courage to follow our conventional 
beliefs to their logical conclusion. 

For if the Cross means anything at all, it 
means that the one Man who dared to be utterly 
good and to take the full consequences of good- 

94 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

ness found no room in the world. The maUgnity 
of reUgious and national leaders, the obtuseness 
of a mob that howled with the conquering party, 
and the tragic zeal of good men who failed to 
recognise goodness when they saw it, conspired 
to nail Him to the Cross. It means that the 
world that had produced Plato, the nation whose 
ear was attuned to the sublime cadence of the 
prophetic word, was so exasperated at the sight 
of perfect goodness, so enraged in the presence 
of utter truth, that it could not tolerate the Man 
in whom they were incarnate ; it had no rest 
till it had done away with Him. And if goodness 
and truth meet with a gentler reception in the 
world to-day, it is because Jesus has lived and 
died, because He has called to Himself out of 
the world those who were willing to be crucified 
with Him. Empty the Cross of all its theo- 
logical meaning, and still it stands as an irre- 
ducible offence to our natural faith in mankind, 
our fond belief that the majority is always right. 
The man who looks at the Cross fairly and squarely, 
though he have given up all dogmatic presup- 
positions, will find it impossible thereafter to 
say. Vox populi, vox Dei, or to trust that ''mixed 
multitude " which makes up his own strangely 
composite and treacherous heart. To the mind 
that faces it honestly, Christianity is sown with 
paradox and collision. It is at once peace and 
a sword, healing and wounds, salvation and 
condemnation. It cannot be neglected without 

95 



Christianity in the New Age 

irreparable loss ; it cannot be accepted without 
leaving indelible scars. It is God meeting man ; 
and what can rob that meeting of its holy terror 
and its healing sting ? 

And the Cross does not stand alone. In its 
wake follows the Church. According to our old 
thought of God, the history of the Church should 
have been one long triumphal march, with the 
seal of sanctity so clearly stamped on the victors' 
brow that even Christ's enemies could not but 
fall back silenced and overawed. But instead 
we have an advance so slow and broken that it 
seems a retrogression, a record stained by un- 
worthy omissions, disintegrating fanaticisms, long, 
dull periods of indifference, tragic relapses into 
worldliness and vice. Says Dora Greenwell, in 
words that seem to drop like molten lead upon 
the current sentiment which takes it for granted 
that the earthly defeat of truth and honour is 
a stain on the Divine escutcheon : — 

What olden Saga is so dark, so sorrowful, so tracked 
by error, so stained with crime, as is the history of the 
Christian Church ? Her attitude is one of unceasing 
antagonism with the great forces of nature which sur- 
round her ; at once oppressed and an oppressor, a 
sufterer and one who causes woe, she can only triumph 
at a mighty cost ; so that she seems,- in Lacordaire's 
energetic words, to be " born crucified " — ^appointed to 
a foreseen death ! Christ is a conqueror whose victories 
have been always won through loss and humiliation. 
His battle-flag, like that of Sigurd, while it has ensured 

96 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

triumph to those who followed it, has brought destruc- 
tion to him who carried it.* 

The history of the Church can only be ex- 
plained by the Cross — a key which, like that of 
Bunyan's pilgrim, " grates hard in the lock/' 
On the facile theory of a God who gives swift and 
palpable victory to His cause, it offers as grim a 
problem to faith as any created by the war. 
On such a theory, the only logical conclusion 
regarding the Church as well as the Empire would 
be that flung out by Mr. William Watson in his 
years of revolt : — 

Best by remembering God, say some. 
We keep our high imperial lot. 

Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come 
When we forgot — when we forgot ! 

A lovelier faith their happier crown, 

But history laughs and weeps it down. 

Yet the final word of the Cross is not defeat 
but victory. It speaks of that victory which 
God has promised to His own. It tells us that 
when God wished, not to humiliate, but to glorify 
His Son in the sight of all men. He sent Him to 
defeat and death ; but that defeat was the 
victory, and in that death, death was abolished. 
For on the Cross an evil world was judged and 
doomed at the very moment of its triumph. The 
world offered tempting alternatives to Jesus, and 
He showed what He thought of them by 

*"Colloquia Crucis," p. 98, 
H 97 



Christianity in the New Age 

deliberately choosing the Cross. The flesh, and 
especially the carnal mind that ever clothes itself 
in the trappings of a superior spirituality, did 
its best to confuse and corrupt His judgments. 
He condemned it once and for all b}^ nailing it 
to the Cross. The powers of darkness flattered 
and threatened Him by turns. He preferred 
the weakness and dereliction of the Cross to the 
empire they promised Him, and so judged the 
Prince of this world. It is easy to see in the 
Cross a defeat borne willingly by our Lord for 
us ; to see in it a victory is to have a new thought 
of God. 

Nor is the victory of the Cross a victory of 
non-resistance. Christ died a militant ; He died 
fighting. He was never faced with an alternative 
such as confronts the pacifist. For Him physical 
resistance to a hostile national party that had 
arrayed the whole machinery of the law against 
Him was out of the question,* unless He con- 
descended to the demagogic methods of false 
messiahs and incited an impressionable rabble 
to defy the powers that be — a course which not 
the most rabid militant deems worthy of any 
noble man, let alone of the Perfect Man. Only 
one kind of resistance was open to Christ; and 
that He chose whole-heartedly. His course was 
to endure, and to judge His enemies in enduring. 

' \^ * Unless the reference to " legions of angels " in Matt, xxvi. 
53, be taken to imply the possibility of physical resistance — an 
interpretation few students would venture upon. 

98 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

No one can read the account of the trial of Jesus 
without realising how implacable was His souFs 
resistance against the moral stupidity and mean 
mahgnity that had brought Him before His 
judges. And in that so terrible because so 
meek resistance the very nature of God is mir- 
rored. As Christ's enemies set the laws to which 
His country was subject in motion against Him, 
so man in sinning has, as it were, confronted 
God with His own immutable law, the law of 
freedom graven deep in the nature of both God 
and man. He has, as it were, " cornered " his 
Creator, tied the hands of Omnipotence, said to 
Him, in whose image He was made, '' You created 
me free : you cannot compel me to be good, or 
keep me from being wicked by force." And 
God's answer is an endurance which is at once 
a tender pleading and a formidable antagonism. 
He is not only our Saviour, but also our Adversary ; 
and never more our Saviour than when He is 
our Adversary. He resists us unto blood, whet- 
ting His sword first on His own bosom and so 
giving it its sharpest edge. He is that Man 
who wrestles with us until the breaking of the 
day. '' Awake, O sword, against My Shepherd, 
and against the man that is My fellow, saith the 
Lord of Hosts." We never realise the smiting 
force of His resistance until we see Him in Jesus 
enduring the contradiction of sinners, dumb as 
a sheep before its shearers, obedient unto the 
death of the Cross. In that terrible, meek 

99 



Christianity in the New Age 

silence we hear the thunder of doom as we cannot 
hear it in the clash and clamour of wrath. As 
we stand face to face with the Christ suffering 
in silence, suffering in unalterable love, there 
comes to us a revelation of Love omnipotent 
which makes it at once the sweetest and the 
most relentless thing in the universe ; at once 
a dove and a sword, a healing dew and a blasting 
tempest. It is as we recognise and experience 
these dread antinomies that we gain a new con- 
ception of God. 



IV 

Our attempts to explore that conception must 
begin with a new study of the Gospels, and 
indeed of the whole New Testament. It is 
significant that the flood of light which recent 
scholarship has poured in upon the New Testa- 
ment has been so scantily utilised by the man of 
vision, who can seize the throbbing heart of a 
book and make it live for this generation. We 
have to a large extent popularised the processes 
and results of criticism, and are familiar with a 
style of preaching which is, in effect, little else 
than diluted Old or New Testament Introduction. 
But these processes and results, however valid, 
remain little more than the professional occu- 
pation of a few experts, unless the light they 
bring is used to reveal the very heart of Scripture 
making it a new book for both preacher and 

lOO 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

hearer. True, scholarly research should have 
no homiletical axe to grind, and the Biblical 
expert who has an eye to the '' preachable " is 
not greatly to be trusted either as an expert 
or as a spiritual guide. But it is equally true 
that the preacher to whom the scholar's work 
is a pure piece of technical exposition, in whom 
the vast contribution of critical research to our 
understanding of the background of the Gospels, 
the setting of the Pauline Epistles, and the genius 
of New Testament Greek does not breed a surer 
grasp, a larger vision, a more potent skill of inter- 
pretation, has failed to realise the greatness of 
his calling. Nothing could be of more evil omen 
for the future of the Church than the existence 
of a large body of critical work that has not 
passed from the scholar's workshop into the 
very fibre of the exegete, the expositor, and the 
preacher. All genuine critical scholarship has 
a spiritual goal. It only needs the man of insight 
and vision to transmute it to a force which re- 
claims and re-creates great tracts of Scripture 
for our age. 

To-day it is the Old rather than the New 
Testament that attracts preacher and hearer. 
The war has flung us back into an Old Testament 
atmosphere. Once more the cry of the hard- 
pressed, hunted soul that echoes through the 
Book of Psalms, the passionate appeal to a God 
who will judge and avenge, the solemn impreca- 
tions and triumphant hymns of a theocratic 

lOI 



Christianity in the New Age 

patriotism waken deep chords in the soul. An 
intensified national consciousness finds support 
and religious sanction in the history of Israel, 
and the sense of a grim struggle for truth and 
righteousness sees its vindication in the God of 
battles who fights for those who defend His cause. 
Popular preaching, and not a little of our religious 
war literature, reflects and furthers this reversion 
to Old Testament ideals ; and the result is not 
to our highest spiritual advantage. If ever there 
was a time when we needed to bring all thought 
and emotion to the test of the perfect revelation 
of God in Christ Jesus, and not to allow ourselves 
to hark back to earlier stages of religious develop- 4 
ment, however we may be tempted to do so by 
the exigencies of an unparalleled situation in 
the world of moral feeling, it is surely to-day. 

Already, indeed, many are turning away from 
a type of teaching which fosters hardness without 
any real strength, and, while stimulating righteous 
indignation, also tends to increase that element 
of suspicion and fear which makes even justifiable 
hatred so dangerous and weakening. Professor 
W. A. Curtis sees in this reaction the beginning 
of a genuine return to the New Testament : — 

I have faith that the neglected Book will find 
interpreters, will reassert its old mastery over the 
human heart, will cool the passions of a grossly am- 
bitious generation, will steal into distracted minds with 
the winsome persuasiveness which lent it its former 

102 



The Need for a New Thought of God 

influence. If the nations are living upon an inter- 
national level which is Old Testament rather than New 
Testament in its spirit, it may be that they are being 
prepared through the bitter experience of war and jealousy 
and hatred to look with an Old Testament wistfulness 
towards a New Era of peace and good will established 
on more secure foundations. Even now, though we 
sing the Psalms with a new appreciation of their fitness 
to our case, it is to the New Testament that we turn 
for admission to a higher hope and a heavenly atmo- 
sphere. It is the New Testament that our brave men 
carry in their reduced kits, the one article in their outfit 
which lightens their campaigning load. It is the New 
Testament that will hold up before statesmen and diplo- 
mats and potentates a vision of another world than that 
which they control.* 

A return to the New Testament, and especially 
to the Gospels, in order to elicit for ourselves 
and for our time its inmost meaning and spirit, is 
the first step towards recovering that specifically 
Christian conception of God for want of which 
our life trails a broken wing. That conception 
as it unfolds itself in the teaching of Jesus, 
authenticates itself in His life and gains world- 
wide redemptive sweep in His death, is the 
supreme treasure of mankind. From it all per- 
sonal holiness and all communal righteousness 
proceed. It is the animating impulse of all 
fruitful thinking and beautiful living. By it 
all great art is nourished ; out of it are born all 

* The Expositor, January, 191 6. 
103 



Christianity in the New Age 

true philanthropy and social reform. To appro- 
priate it as reflected in our present experience 
and seen in the light of present vision, and to 
show it forth to the world in all its constraining 
beauty and purging severity, is to make a con- 
tribution to the age beside which all the national 
effort that has made these dark days' glorious is 
a small thing in comparison. 



104 



CHAPTER V 

THE HIGHWAY OF THE CROSS 

In spite of all that has been done in the interests 
of a supposedly liberal and enlightened Chris- 
tianity to eliminate the Cross, or at least to make 
it of none effect, the deep, ineradicable instinct 
of the Christian heart insists against all argu- 
^ments to the contrary upon making it the centre 
of its faith. It is the Cross that makes the 
Christian, the Cross that makes the saint. So 
far from being one of those dogmatic encum- 
brances that have gathered about Christianity 
as separable accretions, it is its vital principle. 
That we do not realise this sufficiently is due to 
our almost ludicrous deference to outside pro- 
nouncements upon Christianity, especially when 
they happen to come from prominent scientists, 
philosophers, or litterateurs. So long as we con- 
tinue to be unduly depressed when a President 
of the British Association takes a materialistic 
point of view, and almost indecently elated when 
he argues for a spiritual universe, we have failed 
to discern what is essential in Christianity. It 
is characteristic of Christianity, as it is character- 
istic of every religion which involves a vital 
experience, that the things that can be *' proved/' 



Christianity in the New Age 

or corroborated by the opinion of spectators, 
whatever be their intellectual prestige, who do 
not share that experience, are not the things that 
belong to its vital essence. The essentials of 
religion cannot be demonstrated in this second- 
hand way. Their secret lies in the bosom of 
those who have verified them in terms of life ; 
their witness is inward. Evidence is to be treated 
with due respect, and one cannot sufficiently 
deprecate the old-time narrowness and arrogance 
which ruled out of court the testimony of every- 
one who did not happen to be a professing Chris- 
tian. But none the less it remains true that 
evidence of this external kind is just — evidence, 
and therefore utterly inadequate to prove the 
things most worth proving. It is collateral, 
not central ; it strengthens proof, but does not 
supply it. To come to close quarters with the 
vital things of Christianity we need the testimony 
of the Christian soul ; and that testimony is 
something far greater than mere evidence ; it 
is the witness of life. And as we scrutinise that 
life — not as curious anatomisers, but as open- 
minded inquirers — we shall find the mark of the 
Cross inwoven into its very fibre. 



Whenever some great calamity or upheaval 
strips Hfe of its disguises, true-hearted men are 
drawn to the long-neglected Cross. Chaplains 

106 



The Highway of the Cross 

and others who have come upon soldiers pausing 
before a French wayside Calvary have been 
struck by the look of half-bashful yet indubitable 
recognition in the eyes of some of these men. 
'' I understand at last/' these eyes seem to say, 
'' I can't put it into words, but I understand/' 
One wonders if we fully realise the significance 
of that new understanding ; the prevailing tone 
of recent religious literature does not convey that 
impression. In that literature we are told again 
and again that Christianity, so far from being '' a 
subterranean conspiracy against life/' is a glorious 
adventure, a voyage of discovery that sets a 
man's blood tingling. We are reminded how 
OMv brave boys took death in their stride, as it 
were — calmly, simply, merrily even, without sickly 
reflection or regret, but rather as that which 
gives life its bracing salt sting, its imperishable 
glory. They looked into the bright eyes of 
danger and read the secret of life there. To 
despise security and hug risk to one's bosom, 
not to worry, not to think about oneself at all, 
but to '' do one's bit," with the green fields of Eng- 
land set deep in one's heart and the vision of a 
new world somewhere at the back of one's 
mind — that is a man's life, they would say, could 
they put their souls into words. And what is 
such a life, we are asked, but a following of the 
great Adventurer, who also met death early, 
met it for a world of men, met it without a thought 
of self ? Says a writer of verse, appealing to 

107 



Christianity in the New Age 

the clergy to give a simple, vital Christian message 
to our men at the Front and in hospital : — 

And tell him that when, calling on his pride, 

He faced the vilest trenches with a jest, 
That when he, crushing natural fear aside, 

Went over, resolute to do his best. 
That when he bore, albeit with anguished face, 

His pain in silence, nor reviled thereat, 
He was as Christ Himself for each brief space. 

Since Christ Himself could scarce have bettered 
that ! * 

'' Christ Himself could scarce have bettered 
that ! '' The sentiment is natural to hearts bowed 
down and thrilled by the sacrifice of those who 
stand between us and the enemy. To what 
can it be compared, except to the supreme Sacri- 
fice on Calvary ? What more could Christ have 
done, had He stood in these men's place ? Yes, 
it is entirely natural that generous hearts, ac- 
tuated by a genuine religious impulse, should 
exclaim that Christ Himself could scarce have 
bettered that. And yet that sentiment has no 
foundation in reality. It rests upon a pathetic 
blindness to the deepest meaning of the Cross. 
If Christ had not infinitely bettered that, the 
sacrifice of these lads would have been emptied 
of its noblest significance. If Calvary, while it 
included their sacrifice, were not a fact so unique 
that a comparison with any lesser sacrifice is an 

* Captain R. S. T. Cochrane, in Country Life. 
io8 



The Highway of the Cross 

utter impertinence, it could not have refined 
and transformed the suffering of our men to 
the high and holy heroism which marked the 
noblest souls among them. They did so sur- 
passingly well just because Christ had done so 
incomparably better. 

For while Christianity is indeed a great 
adventure, a life of splendid daring and joyous 
risk, it is an adventure with a difference. The 
New Testament thrills with the joy of explora- 
tion, and flings a stinging challenge to tameness 
and mediocrity ; yet adventure is not its last 
word. The adventurer and knight-errant of faith 
is an investor. He does great business in the 
high market of chivalry, risking much that he 
may gain more. But the Christian life at its 
deepest is not an investment, however noble be 
the market. It is a sacrifice, and a sacrifice 
in which not life's meannesses and cowardice, 
but life's wealth and splendour, are made to pass 
through the fire. It means the staking of all 
without any hope of gain ; the '' laying in dust 
of life's glory," with only the love that prompted 
the surrender to uphold the quivering spirit ; 
the mortification of self, not with a view to 
ultimate self -enlargement, but out of pure, un- 
calculating devotion to the claims of Divine 
Love. Its source is not the romantic cross of 
chivalry, but the wondrous Cross of Redemption. 

A writer in one of our religious journals 
recently expressed his misgiving as to the prob- 

109 



Christianity in the New Age 

able effect upon our soldiers of the many crucifixes 
that stud the waysides of France. He feared 
they tended to give them a wrong idea of Chris- 
tianity as a religion of defeat rather than of 
victory. This misgiving embodies the central 
fallacy which is sapping the life out of our re- 
ligion. If the Gospel is true, then Christ con- 
quered on the Cross and reigns from the Tree. 
If the world has indeed been judged by the Cross, 
then its estimates of defeat and victory have been 
reversed for ever. It is the function of the Cross 
to show us where defeat Ues, and where victory ; 
and to adopt a timid, apologetic attitude which 
fastens upon the conception of a risen and glorified 
Conqueror as less likely to antagonise " the man 
in the street,'' is to barter our eternal triumph 
for a cheap effect. It is quite easy to impress 
'' the man in the street " with the figure of a 
Divine Warrior-King riding forth conquering and 
to conquer. The world never finds it difficult 
to take off its hat to success. But our mission 
is not to impress men ; it is to subdue them by 
the mighty weakness of the Cross. It is not the 
lifted hat we seek, but the bended knee. 

How is it that we who bear the name of 
Christ are so slow in learning that there is nothing 
mightier, nothing more irresistibly triumphant, 
than truth beaten to earth by brute force ? 
In this day of ours, when mere physical power 
looms so deceptively before even Christian 
eyes, it is ours to confront the world with a 

no 



The Highway of the Cross 

Crucified Redeemer. It is doing the men who have 
fought for us a grave injustice to imagine that 
they are too dull and coarse to appreciate the 
beauty and wonder of the Cross ; that the figure 
of the world's Redeemer racked in helpless agony 
must inspire them with aversion to, if not con- 
tempt for, a religion whose symbol is the sign 
of defeat. Brave souls that have looked pain 
in the face at its naked worst, and through 
physical horror have pierced to the deathless 
glory of sacrifice, are not likely to shrink from 
the physical element of the Passion with that 
fatal fastidiousness of taste which looks like 
refinement but is in reality a lack of the highest 
spiritual breeding. It is the languid amateurs of 
religion, whose shallov/ sentiment covers an im- 
penetrable hardness of heart, that refuse to 
consider even for one short half-hour the details 
of an agony which their Lord endured for a 
whole long day. We need the courage to hold 
up to men once more the Cross in all its naked- 
ness and let it speak with its own inherent elo- 
quence. We need not fear to repel them. Their 
deepest instinct demands the Cross, and demands 
it not least urgently when they call it by another 
name. We are still too much under the tyranny 
of theological terms. Men may set aside our 
interpretation of the Atonement as parsons' talk ; 
but they know with the unshakable knowledge 
of the heart that the finest, most sacred thing 
in life is the self-sacrifice of good men and women 

III 



Christianity in the New Age 

for pure love's sake, and that all such self-sacri- 
fice somehow runs back into the great, mysterious 
Cross of Calvary. Such a presentation of the 
Cross does not imply a morbid preoccupation 
with the physical details of the Passion; it is 
consonant with no less a reserve than that of 
the Gospel narrative, but it does demand an 
equal explicitness and candour. There is a way 
of preaching the Passion which appeals only to 
the weak and neurotic ; but when rightly em- 
phasised, the physical sufferings of Christ may 
become so many windows into the mystery of 
pain, the meaning of redemption. We have so 
largely identified the Cross with certain devotions 
and services attended chiefly by elderly ladies, 
that we have forgotten that it is food for the 
strong ; that while it is the refuge of the penitent 
and the hope of sinners, its challenge is to the 
brave. Men who have fought for something 
dearer than life and have suffered in an unselfish 
cause are quick to discern that challenge. They 
know without being told that to stand by the 
Cross and look on is the final condemnation ; that 
he who has really seen the Cross is pledged to 
act, to suffer, to be ready to go through the 
world poor, unpopular, misunderstood, suspected, 
despised. 

We need not, therefore, be too greatly sur- 
prised to learn that ''The Imitation of Christ" 
was by far the most popular book with our 
fighting men, that some have been known to 

^ 112 



The Highway of the Gross 

apply for Church membership after reading it, 
and that copies have gone the round of whole 
companies, being passed from man to man till 
they fell to pieces. For while the book is vulner- 
able to criticism as an imitation of Christ, and 
obviously presupposes a monastic temper and 
outlook, it stands unrivalled as a piece of evan- 
gelical wisdom-literature, abounding in sayings 
as pregnant and penetrative as any found in 
the Book of Proverbs. Moreover, it exalts the 
Highway of the Cross as the way for strong men 
willing to take big risks. It calls upon the brave 
and true to share the Cross of Jesus. The arm- 
chair critic may object that its call is limited to 
the sphere of what used to be called personal 
sanctification ; but the man , who has looked 
death in the face has learnt the simple truism 
that wherever religion ends, it must begin at 
home. Jim Bludso, the drunkard and wife- 
beater, who lost his life in saving a train, is a 
fact ; and one need not quarrel with the poet's 
comment that '' God ain't going to be too hard 
on a man that died for men." But the average 
sensible soldier knows that dying for men is not 
a habit with drunkards and wife-beaters. He 
has learnt in a grim school that *' doing one's 
bit " amid shot and shell is, after all, merely a 
curious, crazy new patch on an old garment if 
it is not backed up and corroborated by the 
daily witness of a clean, kindly, upright life. And 
when he reads in '' The Imitation of Christ" that 
I 113 



Christianity in the New Age 

it takes the death of Christ, and a man's daily 
dying with Christ, to redeem his ordinary stay- 
at-home Ufe, he knows it is true. Nor is this 
^merely a mood of the trenches. Men to whom 
a new vision and a new aim have come through 
their experience at the Front dread going back 
and working out their salvation by the side of 
kinsfolk, wives, and comrades who cannot even 
understand such ideals and aims. These men — 
and they are many — feel the power of the Cross, 
They have no theory of the Atonement, but they 
know that the things they are determined to 
be loyal to — honour, purity, gentleness, un- 
selfishness — are the things for which Christ died, 
and that they would never have sought these 
things if they had not been so unspeakably 
precious to Him. Between such men and the 
Crucified there is a deep, inarticulate under- 
standing which years of theological insight cannot 
produce. Hymns about ''the cleansing Blood" 
puzzle or repel them, or else they slide past their 
ears as pretty tunes ; sermons on the Atonement 
bore them, for they $eem irrelevant to the real 
issue. Yet they know that in this sign they shall 
conquer, and when, as in Thomas a Kempis or 
in Brother Lawrence, they catch the authentic 
note of those who are experts in the experimental 
science of the Cross, they pierce through the veil 
of mediaeval phraseology, which the '' advanced " 
theologian often finds an insurmountable barrier, 
with the swift insight of spiritual affinity. - 

114 



The Highway of the Gross 



II 

But while the men who have thus grasped the 
Cross in one experimental aspect have little taste 
or aptitude for theology, it does not follow, of 
course, that the Church can dispense with an 
objective doctrine of the Cross. It is by such 
a doctrine that the fire of sacrifice has been kept 
burning in the temple of humanity ; and while 
history has proved how disastrous it is to preach 
theology to men who are temperamentally unable 
to appreciate theological arguments but who 
are intensely interested in religion, it has also 
proved that whenever the pulpit has disparaged 
objective doctrine in the interests of subjective 
intuition, religion itself has decayed. Yet it 
remains true that whatever be the importance 
of doctrine, the preacher, as distinct from the 
theologian, must approach it not technically but 
experimentally. He must lead his hearers into 
a deeper thought of the Cross as a truth by pre- 
senting it first of all as a way and a life. 

Nor must it be left to the pulpit to exalt the 
Cross. The whole of public worship should be 
the sacramentiim of the soldiers of the Cross. 
That it is anything like that, few would care to 
maintain. The average Church of England service 
offers a beautiful but antiquated liturgy not 
understanded of the common people, and breathing 
a subdued, restrained atmosphere which, how- 

"5 



Christianity in the New Age 

ever great its charm, has Uttle in common with 
the intense devotion, the passionate resolve, the 
unreserved determination to risk and dare, to 
endure and sacrifice, which well up from hearts 
newly opened to the love of God. Nor does 
the average Nonconformist service, with its 
stereotyped complement of hymns, many of which 
have little relation to the religious experience 
of to-day, and its prayers, which offer no oppor- 
tunity for personal and corporate response, leave 
much room for those acts of dedication and fealty, 
and for that solemn self-identification with God's 
will which are the natural movement of souls that 
have seen Jesus. It must, of course, be borne 
in mind that no service which is really a service 
of common prayer can express that movement 
exclusively. It must provide equally for the 
slower pulse, the more tentative approach of 
those who have not so learnt Christ. More- 
over, liturgical reform is at all times a difficult 
and complicated matter, and must, to a large 
extent, be left to the expert who at the same 
time knows the psychology of the Christian 
soul from the inside. But it cannot be too 
strongly emphasised that any form or type of 
worship which does not give expression to the 
aspirations and loyalties of those to whom there 
has come a new vision of purpose is gravely at 
fault. To be convinced that this is so, and to be 
so deeply convinced of it that it becomes a trouble 
and a burden, is the first step towards true reform. 

u6 



The Highway of the Gross 

And if our worship is to reflect these aspira- 
tions and loyalties, the life of the Church must 
recover the same note. That our Church life 
bears the image and superscription of the Cross, 
even its stoutest defenders would hardly be bold 
enough to assert. As far as the broad, shallow, 
untroubled stream of conventional Churchman- 
ship is concerned, the Cross still waits, and before 
we can take it up there is much we must lay 
down. *' Thou hast yet much to part with '' — 
here lies the secret of our failure. 

There is our ecclesiastical past to be sur- 
rendered — not to be forgotten, indeed, but to be 
taken from our own vainglorious hands and 
placed in the hands of our Lord. Dead theories, 
dead traditions, dead methods, how we hug 
them to our bosom, sacrificing His sore travail 
for souls to our obstinate and self-willed adher- 
ence to the old rather than the true ! Nor are 
we necessarily a step nearer the truth when we 
exchange new methods for old. We still often 
speak of the need for a new theology or new 
institutions, as if it were a matter of discarding 
old shoes for new. There is no salvation in 
such a shallow or light-hearted procedure. What 
is fundamentally in question is not a new the- 
ology or new methods — that is why so many of 
the books on religious reconstruction seem in- 
adequate to the situation in exact proportion 
as they are ''up to date " — but a new soul, 
the kind of soul that can address itself to the 

117 



Christianity in the New Age 

task of theological and practical reconstruction 
with spiritual effect. Reconstruction is not the 
Church's first task. To surrender the past, to 
be willing to begin again, to accept whatever 
comes with the seal of God's will upon it, be 
it startlingly new or disconcertingly old, to care 
very little about popular catchwords but every- 
thing about obeying the great Captain's orders 
— that is the Church's first business in this diffi- 
cult and exacting day. It is a task that gives 
no scope for spectacular heroism. There is nothing 
to show at the end, except an emptied and docile 
mind, ready to follow wherever Christ leads. 

And with our past there must go — and go 
for ever — a whole host of cherished conceptions 
and ideals which have passed too long as Christian. 
The Church's conception of sin, for instance, is 
still more conventional than evangelical. We 
still label certain gross transgressions, especially 
those we are pleased to call national sins, as 
sins par excellence, forgetting that if the Gospel 
is true, the gross sinner often retains the capacity 
of recognising the pure and holy Redeemer when 
he sees Him, where smug, complacent Pharisaism 
can look Incarnate Goodness in the face and 
exclaim, '* He hath a devil ! " But if that is so, 
what becomes of our conventional valuation, 
what of our persistent belauding of the merely 
respectable, the morally mediocre, the negatively 
good ? The truth is we have never yet had the 
courage to stand for " the blazing scandal and 

ii8 



The Highway of the Cross 

indiscretion " of Christ's estimate of sin, but in 
face of it have persistently cherished the me- 
chanical and sterile ideal of a goodness which is 
three-fourths propriety. And this is only one 
of many conceptions and ideals current in the 
Church which, while claiming Christ's sanction, 
constitute a fundamental, though often uncon- 
scious, disloyalty to Him. Everything that puts 
respectability before love, everything that esteems 
success above faithfulness, everything that hinders 
the Church from becoming a refuge for the world's 
outcasts and a terror to the world's idols — every 
such thought or practice, however alluring and 
highly reputed, must go if the Church is to 
authenticate herself to those who have genuine 
insight into the genius of Christianity. 

But to surrender these things means to take 
up the Cross. The Church that stands for some- 
thing other than the vaguely religious ideals 
which appeal to the majority of well-meaning 
people who have not ^^et come within sight of 
Calvary will find herself driven into the wilder- 
ness for a season. True, the earnest, simple, 
brave-hearted souls to whom a world-crisis has 
brought a new experience, inarticulate yet pro- 
foundly real, will rally to her standard. But it 
will take years before she will understand how 
to guide and utilise these new disciples who lack 
the most elementary prolegomena of Church- 
manship, to whom Scriptural, let alone theological, 
language is an unfamiliar tongue, who cannot see 

119 



Christianity in the New Age 

the reasonableness of things which are axiomatic 
to those nurtured in the Church, and who take 
not the sUghtest interest in questions that are 
of grave concern to Church folk. It will mean 
misunderstanding, friction, disappointments, and 
set-backs. The Church will be tempted again 
and again to pander to her new constituency as 
she pandered to her old one ; but if she wishes 
to persevere in the Royal Highway of the Cross, 
she must follow where it leads, even though from 
that time many of her disciples go back and 
walk no more with her. 

In reading books dealing with the Church's 
past failure and outlining a programme for the 
future, one sometimes wonders if their authors 
are aware of the existence of the Cross as the 
central fact of the spiritual universe. They 
rightly take the Church to task for her tradition- 
alism, her deference to wealth and social position, 
her conventionality and tameness ; in short, for 
her lack of real Christianity. They then proceed 
to define a Christian Church as one that has 
democratic sympathies, does self-denying social 
service, makes for helpfulness and comradeship, 
gives a reasonable answer to men's doubts, makes 
religion attractive to the average good fellow 
who wants to ''do his bit,'' and affords him the 
moral support and social fellowship which he 
needs to help him to " keep straight." Such a 
Church, they not unreasonably assert, would 
never need to complain of empty pews or a 

I20 



The Highway of the Gross 

decline in membership. And this ideal would 
be entirely commendable — if Jesus had not died 
upon the Cross, and if the Church of the New 
Testament had not been a Church of men who 
had been redeemed and rnade one by an experience 
which can only be explained in terms of the Cross. 
As we read the Gospel story of the passion and 
death of Jesus, so terrible in its restrained sim- 
pHcity, so compeUing in its unexpressed appeal, 
the ideal of a Church based upon the conception 
of Christ as merely '' the Lord of all good life " 
and designed to appeal to the average good fellow 
looks pitifully small and cheap. 



Ill 

If Christianity is indeed a universal religion 
— and only a world-religion can meet the need 
of any nation or class — it must be of wider im- 
port than is indicated by the idiosyncrasies of 
the average man, be he Englishman or Hindu. 
We are anxious to remove from Christianity 
every element that antagonises that average 
man, and we imagine that in doing so we are 
getting rid of narrowing dogmas and obscuring 
accretions. But what if these things, so far 
from being man-made limitations of Christianity, 
are the very marks of its universality ? What 
if the objections of the average man, instead of 
being the righteous rebellion of the free soul, 

121 



Christianity in the New Age 

are the blind protestations of the Hmited, the 
insular soul ? It is because Christianity em- 
braces the whole world in its sweep, because it 
includes in perfect proportion every valid spiritual 
ideal and aspiration, that it repels as well as 
attracts the natural man, and repels that it may 
the more potently attract. It was not its narrow- 
ness that made it a stumbling-block to the Jews 
and foolishness to the Greeks. It irritated both 
because it attempted to lead both into a wider 
world, opening the eye of the Hebrew i:o the 
glory of suffering, and initiating the Greek into 
a deeper knowledge than that of the intellect 
merely. It offended men, and offends men to- 
day, as perfect symmetry offends the eye that 
is used to one-sidedness and disproportion. It 
is precisely its full-orbed perfection that makes 
it, wherever faithfully preached, something of 
a stinging provocation alike to the honest good 
fellow in England, who suspects it of being other- 
worldly, and to the ascetic Hindu, who regards 
it as decidedly worldly. Shall we really seek 
to escape this difficulty by preaching a jolly, 
common-sense version of Christianity to the British 
working-man, and an esoteric, etherealised version 
to the religious Hindu ? No sane person would 
consider such an expedient with any seriousness. 
There must he, of course, many different avenues 
of approach to Christianity, and the wise teacher 
will not dream of trying to force the Eastern 
mind to enter the Temple by the same gate as 

122 



The Highway of the Gross 

the Western. Yet he will never allow himself 
to forget that the object of Christianity is to 
make East and West one by initiating both 
into a new type of life in which their differences 
are not fostered, but transcended, and their 
one-sidednesses corrected, as only life can tran- 
scend and correct the limitations of race and 
temperament. To enter into this new life, how- 
ever many be its gates, cannot be easy either 
for the East or for the West; and as long as we 
conceive it our mission to offer to each only 
those elements in Christianity which correspond 
to its idiosyncrasies, so long will the coming of 
that creative, unifying life be delayed. 

It is at this point that the old word concerning 
the blessedness of them that are not offended in 
Jesus finds its relevancy. There is something 
in Jesus — something in His way of looking at 
things, and His way of appraising things — that 
shocks the judgment of the natural man, limited 
as it is by racial and temperamental preposses- 
sions. Whether we be cast in a Hebraic or in a 
pagan mould, whether our affinities are with 
the meditative East or with the pragmatic West, 
we cannot look at Jesus with unveiled eyes with- 
out being conscious of that collision which the 
Gospels call '' offence.'' It is not doubt, though 
it may be described as the ethical and spiritual 
correlative of doubt. It is to faith what paradox 
is to reason. It stands at the cross-roads from 
where the shining path of faith and the dark 

123 



Christianity in the New Age 

trail of despair branch off to their respective 
ends. The pilgrim may evade it ; and the 
result of such evasion is writ large in the utter 
impotence of all versions of Christianity from 
which the element of offence has been excised. 
The reason why the religious liberalism which 
distilled an uridogmatic Christianity from the 
New Testament was powerless to produce any- 
thing more important than a small circle of 
mildly thoughtful apostles of sweetness and 
light is that Christian personaUty can only be 
created by man's contact with those stern collisions 
of the Gospel which challenge our obtuseness 
and make us aware of the tremendousness of 
our salvation. While a liberal interpretation of 
the Christian facts doubtless makes it more 
easy for a man to accept Christianity, it makes 
it far more difficult for him to retain it amid the 
grim problems which life sets to a facile and 
gently reasonable faith. Nowhere does Ibsen's 
*' Easy to lift, difficult to carry " find such 
poignant application. 

And the offence of Christianity centres in 
the Cross. To preach that Cross, not merely 
as a model of selfless love and sacrifice which 
we can follow, though at a distance, but as a 
great, unique, objective fact, a settled axiom 
of the spiritual world which must re-make us 
before we can speak of ''recapitulating" it, is 
to preach the great '' offence." To lift up the 
Cross once more as the supreme revelation of 

124 



The Highway of the Cross 

sin, of righteousness, and of judgment ; as the 
redeeming Act of God giving Himself in love 
that risks all ; as the power that has broken 
down and is breaking down all barriers of race, 
class and sex, that has destroyed and is destroy- 
ing the present world-order, is to confront men 
with something that cuts deep into their most 
cherished interests and aims. The man who 
sets out to tread the way of the Cross honestly 
but not knowing whither he goes, and who does 
not sooner or later come face to face with the 
offence — that great challenging element in the 
Cross which makes demands flesh and blood 
cannot entertain with equanimity — will not re- 
main on that road very long. He will trail off 
down some flowery by-path, and in the end 
will have nothing left of his initial aspiration 
except, perchance, a faded, sentimental piety 
that likes to have a nicely-carved cross on its 
prie-dieu. Some day the pilgrim of the Cross 
must be brought to the point where he really 
sees that to which his generous ignorance has 
committed him. It rests with the Church to see 
to it that he does not miss that crucial bend of 
the road ; that the flowers of pulpit rhetoric, 
popular religious poetry, and facile sentiment 
do not hide the true Cross from him. It is 
because she has done so little to make men truly 
and wholly Christian and so much to keep them 
Church members that her message lacks power, 
and her life fails to convince. 

125 



CHAPTER VI 

* THE CROSS AND THE ALTAR 

In the middle of St. Paul's great polemic against 
the Judaisers, when the Apostle seems to have 
disappeared behind the controversialist, we come 
upon the classic outburst, '' God forbid that I 
should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, 
and I unto the world/' The words are used 
with a polemic intention, yet such is their in- 
herent magic, their indissoluble connection with 
a larger context, that the argumentative leader 
and his irritating opponents disappear. We are 
out on the deeps of God. The ephemeral has 
receded, and we are left face to face with the 
tremendous fact that for Paul the whilom Pharisee, 
who had never seen Jesus in the flesh, there 
was but one thing wherein to glory — His Cross ; 
and that this glorying of his set the world on 
fire from end to end. Church history makes 
melancholy reading, but the true life of the 
Church is no more contained in the events of 
Church history than the true life of England can 
be gathered from the newspapers. It is found 
in the great succession of men and women of 
all races, types of culture and training who, 

126 



The Gross and the Altar 

glorying in the same Cross, have been Uving 
witnesses to its grace and power. It is for want 
of a Church glorying in the Cross that our preach- 
ing of it is feeble and unattractive. We apologise 
for it, we explain it very carefully, we seek to 
formulate a sane theology of it, and to interpret 
it in consonance with present-day feeling. But 
we cannot as a Church be said to glory in it ; 
if we glory at all, it is in our courage to preach 
it in these difficult days. And as we contrast 
St. PauFs exultant joy in the Cross with our 
demure acceptance of it, and once more look 
into the meaning of the apostle's exclamation 
and into the experience which lies behind it, 
we may discover how to preach the Cross, as 
well as the reason why we fail to glory in it. 



I 

It was not in his own cross that St. Paul gloried. 
We can understand him better when he speaks 
of glorying in tribulation, but the thought of 
exultation in a cross not our own is becoming 
increasingly foreign to us. In glorying in 
the Cross of Jesus Christ, the great Apostle 
exulted, not primarily in the Cross as a symbol 
of service, but in the Cross that creates penitence 
by revealing man's sin as seen in the light of 
a Love so great that humiliation is sweetened 
with gratitude and self-contempt glorified with 
adoring wonder, as we gaze into its depth. It 

127 



Christianity in the New Age 

is impossible to over-emphasise the importance 
of service, but it is quite easy to lay a false em- 
phasis upon it. Much of our present-day teach- 
ing is almost hysterical in its exaggerated stress 
upon the need for utilising the passion for service, 
and in its reiterated warnings against repelling 
men by calling them to repentance. In support 
of such a view, the story of Christ's call to His 
first disciples is twisted out of its elucidating 
context. We are told that Jesus, in calling the 
Galilean fishermen from their nets, summoned 
them to a stirring enterprise, a glorious adven- 
ture, making no conditions except willingness 
to serve, imposing no test save that of loyalty. 
But the facts will not bear construing in the light 
of this modern convention. Behind them lies the 
ministry of John the Baptist — a ministry which 
Jesus acknowledged, making its message of re- 
pentance the text of His early preaching. The 
disciples were familiar with the concept of re- 
pentance and penitence ; what they needed was 
to be emancipated from it, that they might return 
to it later and invest it with the new content 
created by their experience of Christ. To argue 
as if they were twentieth-century Englishmen, 
as is so often done in the interests of a vicious 
apologetic, is surely to juggle with an historical 
situation. 

We are to-day in the trough of a reaction 
against a theology — ostensibly Protestant, but 
essentially a Roman legacy — which hypostatises 

138 



The Cross and the Altar 

sin as if it were a tangible substance that can 
be viewed apart from its concrete manifestations, 
and judged apart from the circumstances under 
which it is committed and from the person who 
commits it. This type of theology has always 
tended to foster a negative attitude, making 
not positive goodness but mere sinlessness the 
Christian's goal, and defining sin as what Dora 
Green well calls '' the violation of a sort of divinely 
constituted etiquette/' The inevitable conse- 
quence of such a conception is to use the term 
''repentance'' with a technical connotation, in- 
telligible to minds trained in theological distinc- 
tions and ecclesiastical subtleties, but quite 
remote from the thought and feeling of the average 
layman, and corresponding to nothing in his 
religious experience. It is out of the reaction 
against a presentation of the Gospel which re- 
duced both sin and repentance to theological 
abstractions that the present-day cult of adven- 
ture and service takes its rise. But while it is 
obviously true that every generous instinct of 
the human heart protests against a religion which 
is little more than a fire-escape, no useful end 
is served when responsible teachers and leaders 
speak as if it was a case of having to choose 
between a caricature of Christianity and a pre- 
sentation of it which puts service before penitence, 
and accepts a vague allegiance to Christ as a 
substitute for complete discipleship. We are 
involved in no such dilemma. Whatever a by- 
J 129 



Christianity in the New Age 

gone theology has made of sin and repentance, 
we know them to be profound reahties, and 
therefore capable of being presented convincingly 
to men of good will in every age. A passion 
for service is to be welcomed as of the most 
hopeful augury ; but it is destined to barrenness, 
unless it be used as a stepping-stone to a genuine 
realisation of sin and a lifelong repentance. This 
is only what our experience of everyday life 
indicates. We would think very little of a man 
whose first thought, after having wronged the 
soul of the woman whose honour is in his keeping, 
is to redouble his external attentions and expend 
more money upon presents. What we instinc- 
tively demand from such a one is, first of all, a 
sense of shame and guilt so deep that he hesitates 
to approach his victim, feeling his very touch 
would be an added insult. If we did approve 
of the external service, it would be in the case 
of coarse-grained natures, in w^hom it is the out- 
ward sign of a growing inward penitence. Why 
should we leave our healthy instincts behind 
us when we approach the deepest aspects of 
hfe ? Why should we, misled by an entirely 
natural desire to make religion attractive to 
men, act as if to conceive of it as '' doing one's 
bit,'' and to regard worship, adoration, confession 
and penitence as so much '' trimming " were not 
merely understandable, but a positive advance 
upon what we are pleased to call a superseded 
type of religion ? If the ancient Greeks recog- 

130 



The Cross and the Altar 

nised that life needed to be purged by pity and 
terror, can we do less ? And in seeking to regain 
a true conception of repentance, we shall secure 
that pity and terror, instead of being instruments 
of world-weariness and despair, as they were 
in the ancient world, shall be the instruments 
of life abounding and full of joy. 

Is it really true that the Christian mind, in 
insisting upon repentance as the foundation of 
all genuine religion, has smitten the life of past 
ages with gloom and morbidness ? One would 
almost think so, to judge from the utterances 
of certain teachers and preachers, who seem to 
view Christian teaching exclusively through the 
somewhat unreliable medium of the man at the 
front. One freely admits that it is high time 
that we saw ourselves '' as Tommy sees us '' ; but 
the salutary force of such a view is not increased 
in the very least by imagining that we are gazing 
at an entirely faithful likeness. That '' Tommy '' 
sees us as he does — as a doleful company of prigs 
and weaklingSy wasting our time in repenting 
of imaginary sins and in performing useless 
ceremonies, and too much concerned about the 
things we ought not to do to have any time 
left for doing anything that is positively good 
— is largely our own fault, but by no means 
entirely so. To imply that " Tommy " enjoys 
a clarity of vision and correctness of judgment 
denied to most mortals, and claimed least of all 
by those who know the object of his criticism 

131 



Christianity in the New Age 

from the inside, is one of those aberrations of 
enthusiasm which will cost us dear if allowed 
to persist unchecked. '* Tommy's '' view, how- 
ever deeply to be pondered, is not the light that 
can guide us through the maze of failure and 
perplexity ; and to reject the old theological 
definitions of sin, repentance, holiness, and wor- 
ship merely to substitute for them the crude and 
often distorted conceptions of ** the man in the 
street " would be a ludicrous proceeding, were 
it not profoundly pathetic. 

Unless we recover the note of repentance 
and penitence, our religion will become but 
another form of moral sentiment and social 
service, and thus cease to be a religion — a force 
that creates moral sentiment and inspires social 
service. And we can only recover it by re- 
discovering the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
It is a positive message that is in question, not 
a barren protest. To inform a man who is 
attracted to Christianity by his desire to serve 
that he will not be allowed to serve until he has 
somehow attained to a sufficient realisation of 
his unworthiness and to an adequate feeling of 
penitence is to repel him without bringing him 
one iota nearer to reality. But as we confront 
such a one with the Cross, showing its bearing, 
not upon the vague, theoretical quantity called 
sin, but upon the meanness of our best service, 
the littleness and shoddiness of our highest 
motives and intentions, the poorness of our 

132 



The Cross and the Altar 

most energetic efforts, the feeble, anaemic hue 
of our virtues, and the pitiful folly of our faults 
and defections, shame and aspiration will be 
born in the heart that is willing to face so searching 
a revelation. A profounder recognition of inbred 
sin and a more subduing sense of wonder and 
adoring love may come later — how far a man 
will pierce into the depths of the spirit depends 
largely upon his temperament — ^but meanwhile 
there will be honest shame and a dim yet real 
conviction that the only chance for such a poor, 
stained, twisted life as his is to keep very close 
to the Crucified. In the measure in which a 
genuine repentance is present, penitence will 
become the man's habitual attitude. From see- 
ing himself foolish, mean and v/arped, he will 
come to trace within his soul a fatal desire to 
evade the claims and consequences of the Cross. 
He will discover the radical twist in his will, the 
lurking antipathy of his heart to a goodness 
which is something other than mere good nature. 
At this point it will dawn upon him that some- 
thing more is needed than the mere recognition 
of the objective fact of the Cross; something 
more even than an attitude of thankful wonder 
and humble love towards the Crucified. He 
will, in fact, be prepared to enter into the Pauhne 
conception of being crucified with Christ. Glorying 
in a Cross not his own, St. Paul nailed his Ufe 
to it until he was dead, not merely to the old 
world-order, but to the old self. 

133 



Christianity in the New Age 

One is accustomed to hear this experience 
dismissed as a piece of exaggerated symbolism, 
a mystical feeling having no foothold in reality. 
And it certainly is no more than that, so long 
as it is divorced from an objective doctrine of 
the Cross and from the penitence which it creates. 
Jt is astonishing how glibly such sentiments as 
" suffering with Christ on behalf of men,'' " shar- 
ing His agony over nations at war,'' and actually 
'' bearing the burden of a broken, bleeding world 
as He bore it " fall from the lips of fashionable 
devotees of pseudo-mysticism. That such senti- 
ments often coexist with an all but impregnable 
self-righteousness, and with an amazingly super- 
cilious attitude towards poor, benighted people 
who *' still " believe in the " official " doctrine 
of the Atonement, is not to be wondered at. 
Whenever fellowship in Christ's sufferings does 
not begin with a deep inward hatred of the sins 
that caused them, chiefly the sins of one's own 
heart, it is a piece of that unreality and self- 
deception which dog the religious temperament. 



II 

For generations past we have theologised about 
the Cross to the point of losing our good temper 
and Christian charity, and almost to the point 
of losing our own souls, but we have been far 
too little concerned to ask if we know what it 
means to be crucified with Christ. Yet if the 

134 



The Gross and the Altar 

testimony of St. Paul is valid, we have no right 
to theologise at all, except upon the basis of 
the crucified life. Whether our theology be 
orthodox or heterodox matters very little ; in 
either case it is a sheer impertinence, unless we 
bear the Cross stamped upon the fibre of our 
lives. Like the Fathers of Nicaea, we must 
come into the arena of theological discussion 
with the marks of the Lord Jesus upon us. Our 
theology must be graven upon the palms of 
our hands. 

But how are we to commend the crucified 
life to a generation that looks upon the ascetic 
element in religion as so much mediaeval lumber ? 
What can demonstrate its power and glory to 
'* the man in the street '' — or the man in the 
pew, for that matter ? 

The task should not be so difficult, after all. 
For the crucified life is the surrendered life, and 
if we have learnt anything during these years 
of stress and strain, it is that the only life worth 
living is the life that is freely given to a good 
cause ; not lent with calculating intent, but 
flung down with the superb generosity of youth. 
Men who have learnt this lesson will surely not 
be surprised when we tell them that the only 
thing that really matters in religion is whether 
our souls, our wills, our deepest selves are really 
surrendered to God. Such men will have no 
difficulty in understanding St. Ignatius Loyola's 
saying, '' Give me twelve men wholly surrendered 

135 



Christianity in the New Age 

to God, and I will convert the world with them/' 
Their experience will supply them with an 
analogy to the saint's lament that " very few 
men understand what God would do with them 
if they would yield themselves entirely to Him." 
Unreserved surrender to a great power, a mighty 
impulse — their hearts vibrate to that iron string. 
The Christian therefore who has begun in 
penitence and ended at the Cross can to-day 
appeal to his neighbours for whom religion merely 
means '' doing one's bit " with a confidence 
which was impossible before. '' I, too," he might 
say, '' want to serve. But then I want to be 
quite sure that I am bringing my best to my 
service. I feel I dare not bring to it a soul 
choked with its own prejudices and predilections, 
a will poisoned and warped by subtle self-seeking, 
a spirit obsessed by its faulty aspirations and 
ideals — ^by that good, in fact, which is the enemy 
of the best. I want to bring a crucified life — 
a spirit that is dead to self and alive to God- 
to the saving of society. I want to lose my life 
with Christ before I have the hardihood to try 
and save the life of my generation. I dare not 
criticise the existing order of things so long as 
my disabling prejudices, my undisciplined in- 
clinations, have not been killed at the root. I 
believe it takes the best of us a lifetime to dis- 
tinguish between our convictions and our pre- 
judices, and for myself I have discovered that 
I cannot distinguish between mine except as 

136 



The Cross and the Altar 

I nail both to the Cross. I have tried to serve 
without the Cross, but my efforts were so queerly 
out of keeping with the rest of my Ufe; and 
this led to the discovery that one cannot use 
one's will day after day in the service of one's 
own moods and fancies, and then suddenly turn 
it on the accomplishment of some humanitarian 
purpose or public reform. I had used my will 
selfishly for long years, and found I could not 
suddenly, on a mere impulse, turn it into * an 
instrument of righteousness.' The work was 
all right, but I had not the sort of will that goes 
with such work. I lacked the humble, teachable, 
disciplined miud, and therefore nothing I did 
had any strength and effectiveness. It didn't 
convince anyone, and least of all myself. In the 
end I realised that there was something in me 
that had to die, and that it could only die on 
the Cross with Christ. I knew it would be a 
slow, piecemeal business— a daily dying, in fact ; 
but I also knew that it was worth it all. And 
so I brought my old life to the Cross and kept it 
there till every bit of it was condemned to death." 
Much futile discussion has centred round the 
old, deep question of what it means to be crucified 
with Christ, and whether, indeed, such an idea 
is not entirely alien to a gospel of life abundant. 
The reconciliation of self-sacrifice and self-realisa« 
tion is at all times a difiicult matter. Both 
clearly have their place in Christianity, and the 
profoundest thinkers have failed to adjust their 

137 



Christianity in the New Age 

rival claims. But while the subject bristles 
with inherent difficulties, its root difficulty is 
imported into it by our doctrinaire attitude to 
what is essentially a vital issue. We first define 
life according to our own preconceived notions, 
and then proceed to argue that the ascetic prin- 
ciple is inimical to life. We appraise the opposing 
demands of self-realisation and self -surrender, 
forgetting that while we are all more or less 
qualified to talk about self-realisation, since we all 
strive to realise ourselves in one way or another, 
only those who have some experimental know- 
ledge of what it means to be crucified with Christ 
are competent to appraise both self-sacrifice and 
self-realisation. In contending that Christianity 
stands, not for the suppression, but for the in- 
tensifying of life, we need first to be quite sure 
as to the kind of life which Christianity aims 
at. Briefly, it is a life that presupposes a death 
— a life that is not merely a purified and perfected 
edition of man's natural life, but a new birth, 
or rather a resurrection. This resurrection is 
not a negation of the natural life. In it every 
worthy characteristic of that life is preserved 
and transfigured ; yet, in its totality, it is not 
a renovation, but a new creation, life remade 
from its centre. As the late Archdeacon Wilber- 
force phrased it, '' Christianity is not an old- 
Adam renovation society. *' Jesus is the Resur- 
rection before He is the Life, and there is no 
resurrection without a dying. 

138 



The Gross and the Altar 

And once that is granted, the whole issue 
shifts its centre. Having agreed that Christianity 
implies not merely life, but a resurrection life — 
a rising up from the grave of a dead self — the 
only question that remains is whether the process 
St. Paul calls being crucified with Christ is indeed 
the sure and fruitful way to the realisation of 
that life in its fullness. The answer will depend 
upon whether we define the ascetic element in 
Christianity as a deliberate system of moral 
and spiritual self-improvement, or as the spon- 
taneous desire of the redeemed soul to enter 
into the sufferings of Christ, and of the poor and 
despised who are so dear to His heart, so that 
by any means it may gain a more intimate fellow- 
ship with Him. (With the perverted and essen- 
tially pagan conception that voluntary mortifi- 
cation is a means of earning the Divine favour 
we are not concerned here.) The majority of 
writers take the first view. Principal Garvie, 
for instance, while rightly contending that '' Jesus 
calls to no artificial asceticism, but to a real 
bearing of the Cross in fellowship with and 
following of Him,'' * yet defines Christian asceti- 
cism as " a limitation of desire for the sake of 
the soul's independence." j That asceticism may 
and should be a mode of the soul's communion 
with God — a spiritual necessity rather than a 
moral drill — does not seem to come within his 
purview, *' As the athlete in training does 

* " Can We Still Follow Jesus ? " p. J19. j Ibid. p. ij8. 

139 



Christianity in the New Age 

deny himself pleasures he would otherwise enjoy, 
so the Christian who wants to be strong and 
brave should practise a measure of self-denial 
even as regards lawful enjoyments. To endure 
a great temptation a man must prepare him- 
self by constant self-control ; and it is not an 
illegitimate asceticism for a man to endure 
some hardness voluntarily, that he may be fit and 
able to withstand when the evil day comes 
upon him." * 

Such self-discipline has, of course, its legitimate 
place in life, but it is not the impelling motive 
of a true Christian asceticism. That motive is 
indicated by the Pauline words, '' with Christ." 
''I am crucified with Christ." To be crucified 
alone, however effective it may be as a piece of 
moral gymnastics, is a dangerous thing. There 
is nothing more unlovely and, on a thorough 
view, more ineffectual in the spiritual world 
than the man who mortifies his desires with a 
view to self -improvement ; nor is there a more 
prolific source of Pharisaism and harshness than 
this type of self-denial. It narrows the sym- 
pathies, dries up the sources of compassion, 
impairs true insight, and blights every action 
with self-consciousness. In essence it is pagan 
rather than Christian, and resolves itself into 
little more than the systematisation of self- 
will. To be crucified with Christ is to enter 
upon a life continents removed from the bleak 

* " Can We Still Follow Jesus ? " p. 117. 
140 



The Cross and the Altar 

existence of the self-regarding ascetic. It also 
is a discipline, it also involves a long and exacting 
process ; but it is a discipline informed by a 
great spiritual impulse, a spontaneous movement 
of the soul. There is no thought of self-improve- 
ment, only of coming into closer contact with 
the great Lover of men, and sharing in some 
small measure His pain and sore travail, His 
intentions and expectations. 

In a certain village there lived a wealthy 
lady, who suddenly decided to leave her fine 
old house and live for a whole year in the 
most ill-conditioned cottage on her estate, taking 
the place of an old woman who had lived and 
died there, using her broken old furniture, living 
on the coarse, scanty fare that had supported 
the old woman's life, wearing clothes as old and 
threadbare as hers had been, working all day 
at mending nets and other ill-paid jobs. Her 
neighbours were naturally puzzled, some con- 
cluding that she wished to expiate a secret crime, 
others that she had become a Roman Catholic 
and was working out a cruel penance imposed 
on her by the priest, others that she was a harm- 
less lunatic. But the truth was quite simple. 
Her soul had suddenly awakened, and she had 
realised with horror that she was a selfish, un- 
sympathetic woman, narrow in mind and heart, 
who could not even think herself into the position 
of the poor folk who were her tenants and neigh- 
bours. It came to her that sympathy and love 

141 



Christianity in the New Age 

were the only things worth having ; and when, 
with all her trying, she could not break down 
the barrier, she went down to live in the old 
cottage with the leaking roof and the rotten 
floor, feeling that no amount of discomfort and 
privation mattered, if only she could get to the 
hearts of her neighbours by understanding them 
from the inside. 

In this incident we have a perfect picture 
of Christian asceticism — a picture that appeals 
at sight to the human heart. To come face to 
face with Jesus means to realise that our motives, 
our sympathies, the very trend of our being 
are alien to Him ; that even while we are being 
drawn to Him, a hostile principle buried deep 
in our lives bars His way to us and ours to Him. 
And as we let Him have His way with us 
and the links that bind us to Him are riveted 
closer, one overmastering desire swallows up 
all else — the desire to be so closely identified 
with Him that we shall see the world through 
His eyes, and that His mind shall be ours. 
Then we realise more fully the nature of 
the gulf that separates us from Him. His life is 
symbolised by the Cross ; ours by the sceptre. 
His heart beats for all men ; ours for a narrow 
circle determined by self. His intentions and 
purposes are those of redeeming Love ; ours 
those of a thinly disguised self-interest. And 
we recognise there is only oiie way to union 
with Him. We must put this old loveless, self- 

142 



The Gross and the Altar 

centred life to death upon a cross not of our 
own making. We must make His way our way, 
His pain our pain, His travail ours. We must 
put ourselves in the line of His intentions and 
purposes, making His outlook our own. That 
is a crucifixion — no term less drastic corresponds 
to the reality — and a rising again. It is not a 
cold, deliberate system of self-training, but a 
transforming emotion, a fiery passion. It has 
nothing to do with stained-glass windows, dull 
books, and cramping rules and regulations : 
it is an adventure of love. It doubtless involves 
dreary days and back-breaking toil — what adven- 
ture does not ? But behind them lies ever the 
warm movement of the human heart, not the 
mechanical commands of the spiritual drill- 
sergeant. Nor is it the experience — passionate 
enough, but still '' departmental '' — of a few 
predestined lovers of the Cross. It is rather 
the gate of a life so wide, a sympathy so warmly 
human, that the wisest among poets and artists 
and the most ardent among philanthropists have 
kindled their torches at its fire. It is true, of 
course, that many who profess to have been 
crucified with Christ are hard and narrow, and 
that not a few who claim no kind of contact with 
Him abound in brotherly love. But if the Cross 
is not merely an accident, or a desperate ex- 
pedient, but the very ground-plan of the Universe, 
then man can only attain to true love and tender 
compassion as he identifies himself with Him 

143 



Christianity in the New Age 

who took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses 
in His supreme act of self -giving. 

The supposition that such identification is 
merely a matter of sorrow and suffering ; that 
the Cross has no imparting of insight, no glorious 
surprises, no unfoldings of love and wisdom, 
no power, no thrill, no joy to irradiate, cannot 
be tolerated for a moment. Traherne did well 
when he extolled the Cross as *' the throne of 
delights,'' declaring it to be '' the abyss of wonders, 
the centre of desires, the house of wisdom, the 
theatre of joys, the root of happiness, and the 
gate of Heaven.*' * 

For generations souls of high mettle have 
revolted from the Cross as from something that 
contracts human life, takes the light out of th^ 
sun, and brings the stuffiness of the cloister into 
God's free and open world. 

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean ! 

The world has grown grey with Thy breath ! 

Much water has run under the bridge since 
Swinburne uttered his feverish protest, and 
neither the revolting pagan nor the discouraged 
Christian is quite so sure that the '' pale Galilean " 
has indeed conquered ; yet the note of revolt is 
heard wherever a man is bored by a Church 
service, or repelled by an uncongenial presen- 
tation of the Gospel. But the fault is not with 
Jesus and His Cross. It may lie in the service 

* "Centuries of Meditation," pp. 39, 41. 
J44 



The Cross and the Altar 

or teaching, or it may lie with the ignorant or 
unsympathetic mind of the critic. In either 
case the blame rests, not with the Cross, but with 
our poor, narrow conception of it. We first 
deplete the Cross of that half of its content 
which gives colour and meaning to the other 
half, and then talk glibly of '' a positive, virile 
Christianity '' that has left the stage of self- 
mortification behind it. Very slowly does it 
come home to us that, with all our talk of virility, 
we are not producing virile character ; that our 
unpruned and undisciplined nature, so far from 
being the glorious, free, untrammelled thing 
we imagine it to be, is in reality a poor dupe 
to its whims and fancies, its preferences and 
idiosyncrasies. One cannot listen to the con- 
versation of even genuinely religious people, 
with its ever-recurring *' I think,'' " I don't hold 
with it," " it doesn't appeal to me/' and other 
selections from the phrase-book of egoism, with- 
out realising that we are not merely incomplete 
but actually ridiculous in our self-importance 
and lack of proportion without some such radical 
life-process as being crucified with Christ. The 
seriousness with which we take our most ill- 
considered views and ungrounded dislikes, the 
positive reverence with which we handle our 
prejudices, the importance we ascribe to our 
feelings and moods — all these things would pro- 
voke us to healthy merriment, had we anything 
of that delightful sense of humour which always 

K 145 



Christianity in the New Age 

distinguished the saints and is one of the most 
powerful of nature's aids to grace. 

The only way of escape from weakness so 
undignified and pretensions so hollow — in short, 
from our self-complacent religious mediocrity, 
is to let the Cross break us and make us over 
again. Always it has been the Cross that has 
made the priest, the warrior-saint. We cannot 
wriggle out of the logic of facts by expatiating 
upon the superstition and puerility that marked 
the mediaeval cult of the Cross. Many of those 
who in past ages have made the Cross their only 
prayer-book, manual of ascetics, and compendium 
of theology were hampered by gross superstition ; 
but mediocre or weak they were not. Theirs 
was a strong, heroic spirit that laughed at im- 
possibilities, and claimed the whole world for 
God. '' When once the saints of the Society 
said, ' I willj it was done," wrote Father Paul 
Ginhac, himself a hero of the Cross, concerning 
the early Jesuits. " Ah, may God deliver us from 
these half -wills, from those men of the ' happy 
medium ' who will and do not will, who will a 
certain thing but not everything. That is the 
greatest scourge in religion.'' 

We deplete the Cross of its rich plenitude 
of meaning when we connect it only with re- - 
pentance, or with the passive virtues, and fail 
to recognise in it that Tree of Life out of which 
all strong and genuine manhood grows. We 
deplete it further when we confine it within the 

146 



The Cross and the Altar 

limits of the individual experience. If the 
soul must be crucified with Christ, so must the 
Church ; and the reason why the Church goes 
weak and halting to-day is that she will not 
consent to die. She clings to a life that depends 
upon the suffrages of men, and in trying to gain 
votes she has lost influence. For man, in spite 
of his blindness and error, demands from the 
Church not support, but leadership. Deep down 
in his soul he expects to be challenged, and not 
to be cajoled. He looks for a God that answers 
by fire ; for a Bride of Christ terrible as an army 
with banners. He wants to see the sword that 
pierces to the marrow, the fan that thoroughly 
purges the threshing-floor, the axe that is laid 
to the root of the tree. But of the Church it 
might rather be said, as Dora Greenwell said 
of the Renascence, that, refusing to die, " it 
remained alone." 

The Renascence, with all the glorious elements it 
contained, was not able to regenerate the Humanity 
it sought to deify, because it would not in any way 
consent to die, nor acknowledge that there is in all mortal 
things a corrupt principle needing restriction, and even 
excision. Therefore "it remained alone," and soon passed 
into a heartless self-worship and dilettantism, willingly 
ignorant of all man's deeper woes, as cruel as the fanat- 
icism it displaced, and under some aspects even more re- 
pulsive. So too will all modern systems pass into 
inanition which deny or ignore, as regards spiritual and 
moral life, a truth which natural life almost forces us 

147 



Christianity in the New Age 

to accept through the strong analogies it presses on 
our notice ; the *' necessary death " through which, as 
through a gate, all life needs to pass, before it can enter 
upon a new condition of being, and faiHng of which 
it remains alone, locked up in the death of a merely 
seeming life, like a mummy or petrifaction.* 

How little the Church has dared to be crucified 
with Christ has emerged during the war. When, 
in the early days of the war, the nation thrilled 
with a high ideal and was open as never before to 
the influence of spiritual leadership, the Church 
was content to be an echo of popular patriotism, 
instead of lifting that patriotism to the level of 
Calvary. It had no message for the hour ; it 
merely marked time by giving a faint religious 
flavour to the better kind of newspaper platitude. 
To realise this it is not necessary to go far below 
the surface ; one need only ask what the Church 
has done to Christianise that body of passionate 
indignation which swept through us as the tale 
of German atrocities was unfolded. She has 
certainly told us that we do right to be angry, 
and warned us to discriminate between righteous 
wrath and blind hatred ; but any decent moralist 
could have told us that, and every sane journalist 
has told us that over and over again. What 
we looked for from the Church was to set beside 
the justifiable but imperfect indignation of the 
people the moral indignation of those who see 
all things from the standpoint of the Cross. 

* " CoUoquia Crucis," pp. 141-42. 
148 



The Gross and the Altar 

For the moral indignation that springs from 
the Cross is not merely indignation at moral 
wrong. It is, first and foremost, a vision of that 
wrong as directed, not merely against the cause 
or the person, the country or the Church, to 
which one has given one's allegiance, but ultim- 
ately against the heart of the Universe ; against 
that which makes goodness and truth, love 
and beauty, possible ; against the God who 
loves men so supremely that He cares more for 
their character than for their comfort. The man 
who is capable of the highest type of moral 
indignation is the man who feels human wrong 
and sin as a hurt to God, and therefore a hurt 
to himself ; who is so closely identified with 
God that nothing can pierce the Heart of the 
Eternal without piercing his heart also. Such 
indignation involves far more than righteous 
anger against the criminal and passionate sym- 
pathy with his victims. It is based upon the 
conviction that the most tragic thing in this 
world-tragedy is the fact that a nation which 
might have been a pillar of righteousness and a 
leading partner in every noble crusade has become 
a vulture-nation, a beast of prey, a horde of 
vandals. To feel this as the darkest blot upon 
the Universe, the deepest anguish to God, and 
the most bitter shame of our common humanity, 
and to utter one's condemnation out of an intense 
personal realisation of these things, is to achieve 
the moral indignation that will strengthen, purify 

149 



Christianity in the New Age 

and uplift a nation, where a lower type tends 
to breed Pharisaic complacency. 

And while not a few voices from within the 
Church have sounded this note, the Church as 
a whole has adopted the lamentable policy of 
supplying a bowdlerised version of popular senti- 
ment, and of carefully watering down any con- 
ception of patriotic duty which might clash 
with conventional opinion. While our news- 
papers give hospitality to the utterances of far- 
seeing men — prophets of a new and larger patriot- 
ism — the Church is still afraid to express what 
many thoughtful minds in all political camps 
have accepted years ago. In this, as in some 
other respects, the despised Puritans might read 
us a salutary lesson. At a time of grave crisis 
these staunch, deep men were able to rebuke 
and exhort the nation, and to influence public 
opinion with an effectiveness which makes the 
Church of to-day appear tragically impotent. 
The reason for this is not far to seek. While 
the Puritans were true patriots and strong Church- 
men, while they loved England to the giving 
of their hearts' blood, and the Church as the 
unconquerable company of the redeemed, their 
outlook was bounded by neither. They viewed 
all things — the nation and the Church included — 
in relation to the Kingdom of God. Their 
horizon was limited only by His purposes. They 
saw Holy Love enthroned in the centre of the 
Universe, and out of that vision they condemned 

150 



The Gross and the Altar 

wrong with an indignation that impressed even 
the careless. For them every sin, even when 
its effects were frustrated on earth, made the 
pillars of the Universe to tremble, and every 
wrong, though it failed to hurt a single human 
being, reverberated in the pure courts of Heaven. 
For all their grimness and literalness, it is they, 
not we, who could have entered most deeply 
into the mind of that anti-Puritan mystic, 
William Blake :— 

A robin redbreast in a cage 
Sets all heaven in a rage ; 
A skylark wounded on the wing 
A cherubim doth cease to sing. 

We of to-day think only of the redbreast's 
misery and the lark's pain. We are humanists, 
and therefore futile. For life is more than 
humanism, and only he who has seen wrong as 
it pierces the Heart of God, and not merely as 
it makes the hearts of men to bleed, can be a 
prophet to his generation. We may learn human- 
ism at the crib of Bethlehem — and it is a Divine 
lesson, indeed — but the power that makes human- 
ism effective, instils healing into the tears of 
pity, and puts a sword into the hand of indig- 
nation, can only be got at the Cross. That 
the Church has not sought it there, but has 
been more concerned to live with the crowd 
than to die with Christ, is the measure of her 
failure. 

151 



Christianity in the New Age 

III 

One of the most momentous religious tendencies 
of to-day is the movement towards the recovery 
of the sacramental principle, which is beginning 
to find its way even into the Free Churches. 
We are coming to recognise that at the centre 
of our religion is not a Cross only, but an Altar. 
The Saviour we worship is not merely One who 
once accomplished a great redeeming Act on 
our behalf, but One who gives us day by day 
His Body and Blood, broken and poured forth, 
that we may live. It follows that the centre 
of our worship cannot be mere praise and adora- 
tion, or confession and intercession, or teaching 
and inspiration ; cannot be anything less, indeed, 
than united partaking of the Body and Blood of 
Christ, and the offering of our own bodies and 
souls as a living sacrifice. It must consist not 
in words, but in an act in which all the powers 
of the soul are engaged, and which is at once a 
taking and a giving. Whatever the gulf between 
the sacerdotal and the evangelical interpretation 
of that principle, all who have a vision of the 
Altar are agreed as to its primitive significance. 
A formal celebration of Holy Communion as a 
mere memorial feast is a service without an 
Altar ; a Quaker meeting based upon the in- 
tention of partaking of the Divine Life, and of 
reconsecrating the lives of the worshippers as a 
pure offering, has the Altar in its midst. 

152 



The Gross and the Altar 

To trace the revival of sacramentalism, as 
distinguished from sacramentarianism, to its roots 
and follow out its implications, would take us 
far beyond the range of our subject. One thing, 
however, must be emphasised. If the principle : 
No Gospel, no Mass, holds true, it is as funda- 
mentally true to say : No Cross, no Altar. This 
means that only those who have accepted the 
Cross both as an objective fact and as a per- 
sonal experience can partake of the Sacrament 
'* worthily.*' The Communion is indeed more 
than the sacramentum of pledged soldiers of the 
Cross ; but unless it is that first of all, it can be 
little more than a pious symbol, where it is not 
a magical superstition. Any theory of the Sacra- 
ment, under whatever theological label it appears, 
which separates the act of receiving the Body 
and Blood of Christ from the act of nailing one's 
life to the Cross, that the new priestly Ufe of 
consecration and sacrifice may be born in us, 
is condemned already. The new life can only 
be gained through the death of the old ; it can 
only be maintained by the continual impartation 
of Christ's own life to us. To disjoin what are 
really two complementary elements of one act 
is to misunderstand the nature of the Gospel. 
It is this violent disjunction that has alienated 
so many from the Sacrament. They have come 
to connect everything that is active, virile and 
heroic in the Christian life with the Cross, and 
everything that is passive, feminine and quietist 

^53 



Christianity in the New Age 

with the Altar. In reaUty, the two are indis- 
solubly one. It is the Christian soldier who 
receives his viaticum for the long campaign, not 
of death but of life ; it is the penitent, hungering 
soul, comforted and reinforced, who is ready to 
be crucified daily with Christ. ''It is only the 
life of the Incarnate God within us that makes 
us priests ; it is His priesthood, His mediation, 
that expresses itself through us. The individual 
self as such is not a priest. Self can represent 
nothing but self. And therefore self must be 
killed and given up whole and entire, like the 
whole burnt-offering on the altar, in order that 
there may be nothing in us but Christ, nothing 
left in us but priesthood.'* * It is not merely 
that the Altar presupposes the Cross ; it is 
equally true that the Cross, in its subjective 
application, would tend to breed that subtle 
self-exaltation which lurks in all self-sacrifice, 
were it not wedded to the Altar. It is not in 
virtue of the strength we draw from our self- 
crucifixion, but by our daily feeding upon a 
Life not our own, that we are made priests unto 
God and men. 

From the men who have fought and from the 
men who face grim responsibilities at home, 
from the minds of thinkers and from the hearts 
of the poor, there comes the demand for a form 
of worship which shall not merely be an inco- 
herent and unprogressive medley of hymns, 

* Ai,.H. McNeile, i* Discipleship, " p. ii6. 



The Gross and the Altar 

prayers, and readings, but a purposeful, closely 
knit procession culminating in a sacramental 
act. Men and women are tired of services which 
seem to them to lead nowhere. Many especially 
who were nurtured in the Free Churches crave 
for a devotional service in which the minister 
— adopting the suggestion of so convinced a 
Free Churchman as Principal Forsyth — shall pray 
in the only position in which he too can truly 
worship, that is, on a level with, and facing the 
same way as, the people. Such a change of 
position may seem a slight matter, but it sym- 
bolises a whole continent of religious conviction 
and feeling. A devotional service in which the 
minister really prays simply and earnestly as one 
of the people is incompatible with the literary 
type of prayer, which has been the bane of Free 
Church worship, and with ambitious or pre- 
tentious sermonising, or rather essay-reading. 
It naturally and inevitably leads to a sacramental 
worship. We are often inclined to judge the 
average worshipper harshly, saying that he listens 
to rather than joins in the prayers, and that his 
only object in following the sermon is to see 
whether the preacher agrees with him. This 
may be largely true ; but as long as so many 
pulpit prayers invite literary appreciation rather 
than devotional sincerity, and so many sermons 
are clever statements of opinion, or attractive 
interpretations of the preacher's mood, rather 
than words of witness or prophecy, so long will 

155 



Christianity in the New Age 

this attitude have some degree of justification. 
In the end there is only one remedy — to make 
Holy Communion the chief Sunday service. 

The Altar is the supreme witness to the 
sovereignty of the Cross over the whole of life. 
Bunyan introduces the Cross near the beginning 
of Christian's pilgrimage, as the place where 
the burden of sin rolls off the pilgrim's back and 
is seen no more — reintroducing it at later stages 
merely as a ground of confidence and a refuge 
in times of despondency or relapse. But the 
power of the Cross is not thus to be confined. 
It is the root principle of our new life in God 
from beginning to end — its revealing light as 
well as its consuming fire, the secret of its beauty 
as well as the source of its strength. Above all, 
it is the soul of prayer. Three-fourths of our 
difiiculties about prayer would vanish if we took 
as the normative type of prayer, not the spasmodic 
cry that is wrung from the average soul in hours 
of distress, nor the easy, habitual prayers of the 
constitutionally pious, or of those who were 
trained in a tradition of daily prayers, but rather 
the prayer that is specifically Christian. Such 
prayer can only be learnt at the Cross, and can 
only be sustained at the Altar. It is a profound 
and exacting act of self-giving, and therefore 
has nothing to do with that glib devotional 
utterance we sometimes call a *' gift of prayer. '* 
It is possible for a person thus endowed to pray 
with daily increasing ease and fervour and yet 

X56 



The Cross and the Altar 

to be daily slipping farther away from reality, 
because all the time he is praying " outside his 
soul/' as it were. His prayer and his real self 
are curiously disjoined, and the ease with which 
he glides from the troubled waters of mundane 
activity into the calm haven of devotion conceals 
the fatal hiatus from him. But true prayer 
always comes hard, for it is the expression of the 
crucified life. It is itself one long crucifixion. 
Its strength lies not in its liberties, but in its 
restraints — in the long, dumb hours when the 
soul is held in dryness and emptiness, until the 
pain of self-knowledge and the longing for a 
God who hides Himself dilate the heart to contain 
the larger revelation, the new call, which God 
is waiting to give. Such prayer is not a matter 
of temperament ; it depends, not on a man's 
devotional tastes, but on his willingness to face 
reality and endure its searching inquisition. 

The Altar reminds us that prayer is a priestly 
act — a sacrifice in which priest and victim are 
one. To-day we are groping our way to a deeper 
recognition of the nature and force of inter- 
cession; but while true prayer will always end 
in intercession, its primary motive is to unite 
the soul with Him who is the source of all benefits. 
The popular objection that it is selfish to pray 
so much for one's own soul shows how little we 
have divined the secret of true priesthood. As 
well say that it was selfish of the woman at 
Bethany to pour the spikenard over the feet 

157 



Christianity in the New Age 

of Jesus, instead of selling it and giving the 
money to the poor. A false altruism is threat- 
ening to cut the very nerve of true Christian 
love. The great saints of past ages did not 
think of themselves, or of self -improvement, 
when they spilt their hearts as water unto God ; 
they only thought of Him, they only sought 
expression for the deep instinct of love which 
urged them to give their all. And out of their 
unreserved self-giving to the Lover of their 
souls there grew a love of men beside which our 
present-day philanthropy seems cold and thin. 
Our current conception of true intercession re- 
solves itself into a putting of ourselves into our 
neighbour's place in the sight of God, thinking 
of his sorrows, trying to realise his difficulties, 
looking at things from his point of view, till we 
can pray for him as if we were praying for our- 
selves. This is excellent, of course ; but it is 
not '' the one thing needful.'' The priestly 
prayer learnt at the Altar is, first and foremost, 
a putting of oneself, not in the place of one's 
neighbours, but in the place of Christ, seeking 
communion with Him in His sorrow and shame 
for man's sin, in His compassion — so different from 
the shallow pity of our own hearts — and in His 
amazing designs for man's true happiness. Until 
the soul of our intercession becomes, not merely 
the repeating of a list of names and needs in a 
spirit of fellow-feeling, but a self-offering to God 
— a crucifying, not merely of our selfishness, but of 

158 



The Gross and the Altar 

our shallowness, that we may indeed fill up what 
is lacking of the sufferings of Christ, and be true 
priests unto our brethren — it must remain feeble. 
It is told of a certain mediaeval saint that 
her reputation for holiness was so great that 
people crowded to her, asking her prayers 
for them. She listened to their requests, but 
promptly forgot all about them — so absorbed 
was she in the contemplation of the Passion of 
Christ. Great was her surprise, therefore, when 
every day brought those who came to thank 
her for the benefits received through her prayers. 
But as she pondered this strange thing, she 
suddenly understood. She had been so closely 
united to the Source of help and healing — it would 
have been strange if none of it had overflowed 
upon those she had forgotten for no selfish reason. 
Which thing is a parable, for the Church as well 
as for the soul. Until we have the courage to 
restore the Cross and the Altar to their primary 
and central place in our life, we shall remain 
ineffective among men, and most ineffective 
in prayer. To regard prayer, as we so often 
tend to do, as a sympathetic, or rather telepathic, 
exercise used with altruistic ends, is fatal. It is 
either communion with God, or it is nothing ; and 
until our supreme passion is once more the desire 
to have communion with God in the love that 
sent Jesus to the Cross, and in the Broken Body 
and the Blood outpoured for our redeeming, we 
have not even begun to understand Christianity. 

159 



PART III 
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 



CHAPTER VII 

THE NEED FOR AN ADVENTUROUS THEOLOGY 

Our mental habit leads us to connect the spirit 
of adventure with action but deny it to thought ; 
to seek it in the Mission-field and scorn to look 
for it in the study. That thought is also a 
risky business and demands a stout heart no 
less than action, is about the last thing we are 
wiUing to believe. Yet it ought not to be very 
hard to realise it ; in the sphere of practical 
morals, at any rate, it is abundantly obvious. 
Here is a man given over to self-indulgence or 
greed, or to the lust of getting on in the world. 
He is not a bad man at heart ; he is simply 
one of the thousands who take the line of least 
resistance, following their natural bent. If only 
he would take time to think ! One long look 
at his life in the face of the great realities — love, 
honour, death — would suffice to make a different 
man of him ; one honest, brave piece of thinking 
would shatter his world of delusions about his 
ears. But he shirks the task. His mind is 
encrusted with prejudices, his conscience vitiated 
by shoddy motives and petty equivocations, his 
emotions strangled by the fungus-growth of 
selfishness. To clear such an accumulation of 

163 



Christianity in the New Age 

moral rubbish away and determine to see things 
as they really are, demands more courage than 
he can comfortably muster. It also involves 
considerable risk, for it might end in the dis- 
covery that in his deepest heart he really pre- 
ferred purity to self-gratification ; really believed 
that honour was better than gain, and a clear 
conscience than attained ambition. And once 
he realised that, he would be involved in a struggle 
between his base and his true self which only 
death could end. Small wonder that he flees 
thought of this kind, until he has lost the very 
power of thinking. 

But if this is true in the sphere of practical 
morals, it must be as true in the realm of that 
spiritual life which gives to morality its highest 
significance. For the spiritual life is not a 
static, but a kinetic, force. It is a history of 
absorbing interest and momentous import. Like 
the moral life, it demands brave, patient thinking 
with a view to right action. In no sphere is it 
easier to let reality slip, and to move in a world 
of shadows without knowing it ; nowhere has 
self-deception a more favourable breeding-ground. 
And it is one of the most important functions 
of theology to keep the soul and the Church 
awake to reality, and to rouse them anew when 
they have yielded to the poppy vapour of self- 
delusion. This may seem quite beside the mark 
to those who look upon theology as merely a 
traditional formulation of belief and a theoretical 

164 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

discussion of conflicting views. Such a theology 
has certainly no vital power to change anything. 
But if theology means the constant re-thinking 
of the fundamental realities of faith in the light 
of present need and experience ; if it means 
the kind of thinking about God and His purposes 
in virtue of which our spiritual existence is a 
history y and not a mere succession of moods and 
emotions, then it is an adventurous under- 
taking, and one that can turn worlds upside 
down, in exactly the same way as half an 
hour's honest thinking in practical ethics can 
change the life of a debauchee or a money- 
grabber. 

Take the case of a man who has suddenly 
awakened to the mediocrity and feebleness, the 
utter unreality, of his religious life. He sits 
down to think. The first idea that happens to 
float into his mind is the initial affirmation of the 
Apostles' Creed, '' I believe in God, the Father 
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.'' He 
knows that, cold as the creeds seem to us to-day, 
they express the most passionate convictions of 
those who framed them. He remembers having 
been told in connection with another creed, the 
Nicene, that in that day the very shopkeepers 
and artisans discussed the metaphysics of the 
Person of Christ. And this leads him to reason 
within himself somewhat after this fashion : 
" What did these words mean to the men whose 
faith they originally expressed — men so different 

165 



Christianity in the New Age 

from myself in a thousand ways, yet having the 
same deep needs, the same desires, passions and 
sorrows ? Many of them died that this faith 
might be handed down to me, so the least I 
can do is to try and get some 'idea of what it 
really meant to them. And perhaps this may 
help me to get at the meaning of it all for me 
to-day. Do I really believe in God, the Father 
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth ; and what 
precisely do I understand by the terms ' Father ' 
and ' Maker ' ? And if I do believe in God 
as my Creator and Father, how about my life ? 
How is it that I am eaten up with worry and 
anxiet}^, that I am afraid — yes, ' afraid ' is 
the word — of everything that can hurt me ? 
How is it that I grasp at things which a child 
of the great Father and Maker of heaven and 
earth has no business to covet at all, and that 
I am so easily tempted to fretfulness and mean- 
ness ? Perhaps it is because I don't really 
believe in Him, after all. But if so, what do 
I really believe ? " And here the serious business 
of thinking begins. The process may be of the 
simplest and most elementary kind, and the 
man who puts himself through this mill may 
never have read a theological treatise ; yet 
he is to that extent a theologian, and a far 
sounder theologian than the mere theoretical 
expert. 



i66 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

I 

Now theology thus appHed — and such an appli- 
cation, so far from belittling the scientific work 
of the professional theologian, gives it its true 
place as a power-house of Christian thought — 
is a great adventure. The thing we need to 
fear above all else is a '' safe '' theology. Nor 
is the cult of *' safety'' in theological thinking 
confined to definitely orthodox quarters. There 
is to-day a good deal of theologising in the 
name of freedom which is afraid of the 
adventurous heart of Christianity, and shrinks 
from antagonising contemporary prejudices and 
life-habits as timidly as traditional theolo- 
gians shrink from disturbing the uncritical ac- 
ceptance of ''official'' dogmas. There is a 
common type of theology which takes a some- 
what swaggering attitude towards what it calls 
" the ghosts of a dead past," but is quite re- 
markably meek and apologetic in the face of 
the dislikes and prepossessions of an unheroic 
present. The microbe of safety has always 
affected theology, and what we are pleased to 
call obscurantism has ver}^ often been the out- 
come, not of a rigidly conservative conviction, 
but of a frantic desire to save the Church at 
all costs, and to secure historical institutions 
against invasion, whether from critical " Bar- 
barians " without or from the working of the 
Spirit within. And still in many ways, subtle 

167 



Christianity in the New Age 

and overt, we tend to make " Safety first " 
our theological motto, working out our thought 
of God with an eye upon existing institutions 
and prevailing prejudices, and so infecting the 
whole life of the Church with cowardice and 
mediocrity. 

It is not the speculative theologian who is 
most likely to succumb to this temptation. He 
has his own dangers to face. He is apt to lose 
touch with the facts of life, and to think in 
vacuo. But while it may be a futile thing to 
sit upon the edge of a cloud and pretend the 
world does not exist, no one could possibly call 
it safe ; and the genuinely speculative theologian 
always has something of the explorer's courage 
in his composition. It is the teacher who works 
out his theology with the Church and the needs 
of the average churchgoer in view who will 
most frequently be tempted to put safety before 
truth, on the plea that vital needs come before 
correct theories, and that it is more important 
for the Church to be preserved alive than for 
it to possess the highest possible conception of 
its function and message. The tendency is 
always to work upon the principle that '' he 
who fights and runs away lives to fight another 
day,'' and to remind ourselves that the Church 
that dies a victim to its own ideals exchanges the 
chance of being an efficient, if somewhat defective, 
working force for the pale and pathetic halo of 
ineffective martyrdom. Besides, there is the 

1 68 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

thing we call historical continuity to be con- 
sidered. To break historical continuity would be 
not merely a suicidal but a blasphemous policy, 
and a Church that adopted an adventurous 
theology and followed it up by an equally adven- 
turous practice might easily break that continuity 
by the simple process of becoming defunct, 
since average humanity is scarcely ripe for mem- 
bership in so uncomfortable a body. That the 
death of the Church in its present form would 
no more do away with real historical continuity 
than the chrysalis stage breaks the continuity 
of a butterfly's development, does not seem to 
occur to these apostles of safety. The Church 
that can face the new age with confidence and 
power is not a Church that cares about historical 
continuity, in the commonly accepted sense of 
that term, but a Church that is prepared to 
die ; and that not because she is doctrinaire 
and thinks more of theories than of life, but, on 
the contrary, because of her passionate belief 
in the only life worth having — the life that can 
be crucified and buried and rise again on the 
third day. Whenever the doctrine of the Divine 
Adventure which lies at the root of Christianity 
is weakened or modified in the supposed interests 
of life, it is because the life aimed at is not the 
free life of the Spirit. True life cannot be insured 
against '' accidents " by theological safety devices. 
To put safety first is to put life last, if indeed 
there is any life left worth considering. A 

169 



Christianity in the New Age 

system of safety that absolves life from ad- 
venturing is the deadliest conspiracy against life. 
An interesting study which appeared in the 
Atlantic Monthly a year or two back treats of 
this peril in dramatic form. It tells of two 
lovers eager to marry, but held back by prudential 
considerations advanced by themselves and by 
their respective families. Vague objections are 
made, based not upon definite facts, but upon 
the general insecurity of life. The tacit demand 
is for insurance against every possible evil that 
might overtake these young people. But of all 
that depressing company one man — the father 
of the young girl — ^sees life with different eyes. 
He is a convict, and his remarks to the young 
man, who visits him in prison to ask for the 
hand of his daughter, are worth quoting : — 

" They haven't the point of view. It's life that is 
the great adventure. Not marriage, not business. They 
are just chapters in the book. The main thing is to 
take the road fearlessly — to have courage to live one's 
life. . . . That is the great word. Don't you see 
what ails your father's point of view, and my wife's ? 
One wants absolute security in one way for Ruth ; the 
other wants absolute security in another way for you. 
And security — why it's just the one thing a human 
being cannot have, the thing that's the damnation of 
him if he gets it ! The reason it is so hard for a rich 
man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven is that he has 
that false sense of security. To demand it just dis- 
integrates a man. I don't know why — it does. . . . 

170 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

The mastery of life comes with the knowledge of our 
power to endure. That's it. You are safe only when 
you can stand everything that can happen to you. 
Thus. and thus only! Endurance is the measure of 
the man. . . . Courage is security. There is no 
other kind." 

It is the practical theologian's craving for a 
security other than that of courage to follow 
the guidance of God's Spirit that has largely 
contributed to the alienation of thoughtful men 
and women from the Churches. The theological 
terminology of bygone ages, devoid of real mean- 
ing, let alone of religious value, to the mind of 
to-day, is retained, not merely in most of our 
popular religious teaching, but also in our public 
worship ; and the motive is always to supply 
a safeguard for '' the deposit of faith,'' and to 
preserve a sense of historical continuity. We are 
told that to make any radical change would 
be to incur the danger of losing our precious 
heritage of Christian doctrine, and killing our 
ancient institutions. Of course, there is danger 
— there must be danger, so long as life itself 
remains the superbly dangerous experience it 
is — but the peril is no greater than that which 
threatened the Christian heritage when St. Paul 
took the Gospel to the Gentiles, subjecting the 
Apostolic tradition to the influences of pagan 
thought, translating the Gospel of the Kingdom 
into terms of a world-religion, and planting 
the Church where it would be moulded by the 

171 



Christianity in the New Age 

impact of Roman institutionalism. If Chris- 
tianity not only survived that ordeal, but was 
universalised by it and planted deep in the heart 
of mankind ; if it survived the later ordeal of 
Reformation times, emerging from it with twice- 
broken fetters, why need we fear to risk it yet 
again in the name of Jesus and His Gospel ? 
There is only one thing to fear, indeed — the 
stagnation and desiccation which spell death. 
If, duped by our timidity, we persist in allowing 
inadequate conceptions of God and His service 
to determine our thought and worship, antiquated 
methods to hamper our work, and effete institu- 
tions to imperil our souls, the Church of the near 
future will be safely — dead. 

Nor is theological liberalism the cure for this 
timidity. Theological liberalism may be, and 
sometimes is, as tame and tepid, as concerned 
about established institutions, and as afraid of 
adventure as any orthodoxy could be. Even 
present-day theological liberalism not infrequently 
shows a concern for the preservation of the Church 
as by law established which is curiously remin- 
iscent both of eighteenth-century Rationalism 
and of orthodox Moderatism. With a curious 
failure to appreciate the great fundamental doc- 
trines of Christianity in their historical develop- 
ment, it often combines an illogical anxiety to 
preserve the institutions which presuppose them. 
Theological liberalism has, in fact, remained 
largely Victorian in its outlook ; and it is significant 

172 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

that not one of the adventurous Christian move- 
ments of recent times, such as the Student Move- 
ment, the Free Church and AngUcan Fellowships, 
the Collegium, etc., has originated with theological 
liberahsm. With hardly any exception, these 
movements have been inspired by the representa- 
tives of a positive, constructive Christian faith, 
centred in Christ as the Saviour and Lord of 
men, and in His Cross as the symbol of redemption 
and the only way of life. It is not a liberal 
theology which is our supreme need to-day, but 
a theology that is absolutely fearless in inter- 
preting the Gospel to our generation, and in 
pressing its daring consequences home upon the 
conscience of all Christians — a theology, in short, 
that prefers reality to safety. We need not be 
astonished when plain folk view the modernist 
with suspicion. There is, of course, a candid 
and courageous modernism which has done great 
service in theology ; but we have had far too 
much of a less desirable type that ranged 
itself with the most conservative and obscurantist 
defenders of antiquated and unspiritual institu- 
tions, because these institutions allow a cold, 
intellectual modernism to exist undisturbed, but 
have scant tolerance for an aggressive super- 
naturalism which happens to be profoundly 
spiritual. Professor Percy Gardner gives a shrewd 
characterisation of this school which, while not 
explicitly Erastian, lauds the practical effect of 
the Establishment in maintaining within the 

173 



Christianity in the New Age 

Church that equable, reasonable and unruffled 
atmosphere in which a liberal theology can 
flourish unhindered. '' A limited degree of State 
regulation/' says this type of modernist, '' keeps 
a Church sound and healthy, saves it from ex- 
cesses and unreality, and secures in it the domin- 
ance of common sense. An Anglican clergyman, 
though he must keep to the Liturgy, is very free 
in his teaching ; he is responsible in the long run 
only to secular Courts which are very tolerant 
in their interpretation of Church formulae. The 
control of Bishops is very discreet, and Bishops, 
being nominated by the Prime Minister, are 
nearly always men of moderation and tact. . , 
In a time of interregnum, when religious beliefs 
are passing from one stage to another, it is far 
the best to have a system in which external 
regularity and decency are enforced but views 
are not investigated.*' * 

Modernists of this school cheerfully submit 
to a form of worship which for the unsophisticated 
layman is in direct contradiction to the *' liberal '' 
doctrine preached from the pulpit, so long as the 
Church remains amenable only to a secular 
authority which stands for " the dominance of 
common sense,'' and is very tolerant (should 
it not rather be wholly indifferent ?) in its inter- 
pretation of Church formulae. That to be safe- 
guarded by the theological ignorance and spiritual 
indifference of secular Courts, or by the discreet 

* " Evolution in Christian Doctrine," pp. 228, 232, 233. 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

tactfulness of Bishops nominated by the Crown, 
is the very worst thing that could happen to 
modernism, or indeed to any other type of 
Christian thinking ; that, on the contrary, the 
most fanatical and prejudiced ecclesiastical Court, 
provided its interests were spiritual, is infinitely 
preferable to such " tolerance,*' does not seem to 
occur to them. 

One is aware, of course, that many modernists 
set their hopes upon the gradual, subterranean 
leavening of popular religion with enlightened 
conceptions under cover of an ecclesiastical policy 
of laissez faire. But is it really of first importance 
that the general religious mind should be leavened 
with a sufficient number of enlightened concep- 
tions ? There is ample room for the leavening 
process in Christian teaching, but it can never 
take the place of the more direct and Apostolic 
method. For the characteristic thing about 
Christianity is that the manner of receiving it 
is as important as the content of that which is 
received, that the How is as momentous as 
the What. To accept Christianity with a free, 
brave, passionate soul that is prepared to witness 
to its profession even to the laying down of 
life if need be, and to make experience of the 
new way to the uttermost of peril, opposition 
and contempt, is the one thing needful, and not the 
existence of a system which renders these qualities 
superfluous and, indeed, views them as a lapse 
from that " common sense *' which is the idol 

175 



Christianity in the New Age 

of this type of modernism. No safeguarded 
theology, no amount of incubation with enUght- 
ened views behind the scenes, will meet the 
demands of an age which, with all its faults, has 
come to realise that unless religion is a huge 
risk it is nothing. At the heart of the Gospel 
is the Cross of Jesus, and whatever our theology 
may be, we know that the Cross does not stand 
for '' the predominance of common sense." We 
know that it was not to save the Church from 
'' excesses " that Jesus died. We know that 
the Cross commits Christ's servants to something 
far other than *' a peaceful propagation of enlight- 
ened views " under the aegis of an orthodox, 
liturgy and a tolerant Episcopate. It means, 
to say the very least, loyalty to a Captain who 
cares nothing at all for safety and everything for 
reality. Jesus was not a wary and prudent 
reformer of popular religion. He was the Divine 
Prodigal of love, spending His substance '' riot- 
ously " to His last drop of blood. 

II 

An adventurous theology will insist that this 
central fact of Christianity — the prodigal self- 
spending Love of God and its demands upon 
us — be interpreted in the Church's formulae and 
find expression in her worship and life. It 
cannot stop short of a declaration of faith and 
a form of public worship which bear clear and 

176 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

adequate witness to it. The traditional creeds 
and formulae bear no such witness. Instead of 
setting forth Jesus and saying, '' God is like 
that ! " they first define God the Father in terms 
of Greek metaphysics and Roman legalism, and 
then declare that the Son is co-equal with Him. 
Nor is this the language of the creeds merely : 
it stands for a conception of God which is stamped 
upon the Church's worship, and obscures the 
meaning of Christianity for the common people 
from childhood up. In the case of the Church 
of England Prayer Book, revision has become a 
primary necessity ; and it is a matter for regret 
that the present movement towards revision is 
organised in the interests of sacerdotal con- 
victions, neither evangelicals nor modernists being 
apparently concerned about .securing a revision 
on non-sacerdotal lines. It is surprising indeed 
to find so vigorous and thoughtful a representative 
of progressive evangelicalism as Mr. Charles E. 
Raven expressing the view that the movement 
towards revision is untimely, and its promoters 
blind to the real issues of the hour, characterising 
it as the action of men who '' have used the 
present as an occasion for airing their peculiar 
fads instead of devoting themselves to the Gospel 
of the love of Jesus.'' Such a movement, he 
thinks, will contribute nothing to the ingathering 
of the lapsed masses, since ''it is not the ' hard 
sayings ' of our doctrines, or the archaic phrases 
of our hturgy, which drive men to reject Christ, 
M J 77 



Christianity in the New Age 

but the un-Christian and loveless lives of His 
followers/'* There is surely some confusion here. 
In pressing for a revision of doctrinal standards 
and forms of worship on the score of their in- 
adequacy to express and render intelligible the 
deepest thing in Christianity, we do not for a 
moment imply that the lack of such re- 
vision '* drives men to reject Christ/' but simply 
that it keeps them from darkening our church 
doors. And since the Church was made for 
man, and a Church whose Common Prayer ob- 
scures and enfeebles her witness to Jesus has 
lost her raison d'etre, we count it our duty to 
give ourselves no rest until our worship and our 
convictions be in full accord. To urge that it 
is our lovelessness that keeps people from joining 
our fellowship is beside the mark. Prayer-Book 
revision cannot be conceived as hindering, or 
even as retarding, the growth of love among us ; 
on the contrary, by giving us forms which express 
the fundamental realities of the Gospel, it would 
make every service a call and an inspiration to love, 
instead of a recital of dead theological formulae. 
The majority of those outside the Anglo-Catholic 
party (as well as of many inside it) who demand 
Prayer-Book revision do so precisely because 
they are striving to fulfil the law of love, and 
desire to find expression for their deepest con- 
victions in public worship. 

While it is deplorably true that the loveless- 

f t' What think ye of Christ ? " pp. 234-5. 

178 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

ness which is our practical denial of the Gospel 
has misrepresented Christ to thousands who 
might otherwise have become His disciples, it 
is no less true that many children of the Church 
who have seen Church life not at its worst hut at 
its best are outside the Church to-day, because 
they found nothing in her services and teaching 
to correspond to their spiritual needs. They 
cherish happy memories of the Christian fellow- 
ship in which they were nurtured ; they look 
back wistfully to their childhood, with its warm, 
simple faith, its golden Sundays, its wonderful 
reverence for the House of God. But though 
they look back with tender eyes, it does not 
occur to them to turn back. It is not that they 
have lost grip of religion. They are often pas- 
sionate advocates of the Christian ethic, and 
in most cases feel that there is something behind 
that ethic which is even more vital — something 
they cannot formulate, but which they know 
centres in the Person of Jesus. They would like 
to penetrate into that mystery, but cannot see 
for the life of them what the liturgy of the Church 
contributes to its elucidation. It moves in a 
world shadowy and remote ; its language conveys 
little to them. In the days of their youth 
they had accepted the conventional explanation 
of the theological terms with which it bristles, 
but there came a time when these explanations 
were seen to be a process of defining one unknown 
by another. They felt themselves caught in a 

179 



Christianity in the New Age 

vicious circle of metaphors and abstract terms 
having no relation that they could see to that 
central Figure which seemed so tremendously 
alive to them in their best hours, and became 
so dead when reduced to the cut-and-dried 
formulae of Patristic theology. Surely the Church 
has a grave duty towards such — a duty which 
our inveterate habit of viewing theology under 
the categories of '' orthodox '' and " heterodox '' 
has largely hidden from our eyes. The first 
question to ask concerning any dogma of the 
Church is not whether it conforms, or does not 
conform, to orthodox standards, but whether 
^>it serves to reveal or to obscure the Figure of 
the Living Christ. For thousands of willing 
souls Christ lies buried in a grave of theological 
subtleties. It is for us to roll away the stones, 
not to dispute about the inscriptions upon 
them. 

Two opposite ideals of Churchmanship have 
divided our leaders into hostile c^mps, the con- 
troversy reaching its height when the popularisa- 
tion of the results of critical scholarship made 
many to tremble for the Ark of God. One school 
insists upon a tender regard for Christ's little 
ones, and a scrupulous avoidance of any state- 
ment that would shock the simple faith of aged 
believers. The other contends that consideration 
for those easily offended is not the teacher's only 
duty ; he has to take thought not merely for 
those within the Church whose faith might reel 

i8o 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

under the overthrow of cherished theological 
traditions, but also for those who keep aloof from 
the Church because of its alleged adherence to 
those traditions. It is not only towards the 
Church of the present, but towards the Church 
of the future, that he is responsible. What avails 
his *' economy '' of new conceptions, if in con- 
ciliating the old folk it alienates young life, and, 
indeed, makes Church membership difficult for 
unborn generations ?^ 

Both these positions have their justification, 
and both have been abused by their defenders. 
The solution of the difficulty lies in retaining a 
right conception of the nature of the Church. 
The Church is not an association of amateur 
theologians ; it is a family, in which old and 
young, learned and simple, bold and timid, form 
one organic whole. Its family character is its 
glory ; there is nothing of that sectional or 
eclectic atmosphere about it that makes a New 
Thought meeting, for instance, such an artificial 
and melancholy business. Its unifying centre 
is a living Person ; its uniting link is mutual 
love. In such a family it is possible to achieve 
what would be impossible in any eclectic sect 
or cult — a teaching and a worship in which all 
its members find their place, and none is offended 
or wronged. Wherever Christ Himself, and not 
a set of doctrines about Him, is made the centre 
of a Church, the scribe may bring forth from 
his treasury both the new and the old. Such a 

i8i 



Christianity in the New Age 

Church will care little for theological labels, but 
everything for the maintenance of a clear, ex- 
perimental witness to its Lord. Its theology will 
not be stagnant or traditional, but neither will 
it be reckless or flippant. It will be, in the truest 
sense, an adventurous theology ; for it will submit, 
not merely the new, but the old also, to the test 
of the Life that is the light of men. ' It will 
commit itself to no school or party, but dare to 
follow the Spirit's leading in its thinking as well 
as in its practical work. Theological catchwords, 
however '' advanced," are the stock-in-trade of 
the timid and the mediocre. The true adventurer 
of faith goeth forth not knowing whither he 
goeth. He knows his Captain; he does not ask 
to see the name of the road. 



Ill 

The temptation to make a bid for theological 
safety is by no means confined to theologians. In 
subtler form it is found in quarters where theology 
is somewhat at a discount, and it is not seldom 
most effectual when its presence is least suspected. 
A vivid exemplification of this tendency is afforded 
by the late lamented Donald Hankey's inimitable 
portraiture of an average layman who has come 
to the conclusion that it is " up to him " to be 
a Churchman.* He comes to Communion, saying 
in his heart, " Lord Jesus, I want to be a bit 

* In i* Faith or Fear?" pp. 23-27. 
182 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

of Thee. I want to show a Uttle bit of Thee 
to the world. I want to offer Thee my body, 
to be a member of Thy Body, that it may show 
to the world a little of Thy Spirit.'' He then 
goes to the clergyman, who discovers that he has 
never been baptised. " I'm glad of this. Padre/' 
he says, '' it's a chance to get things square. I 
want to stand up before you and my witnesses, 
and to say quite plainly that I desire to fight 
beneath the Cross, the standard of Jesus Christ, 
that I want to be a member of His Body, and 
to do my bit towards showing Him to the world. 
I want to say that I don't believe in selfishness 
and material ambition, and that I do believe in 
goodness and honesty and love and freedom." 
But when the clergyman reads to him the Service 
for Baptism of Such as be of Riper Years, he 
becomes alarmed. '* This is awfully long-winded," 
he says. '' What exactly do you mean by 
' mystical washing away,' ' spiritual regeneration,' 
* elect children,' / everlasting salvation,' and being 
' damned ' ? And do you really believe in the 
resurrection of the flesh, because I'm hanged if 
I do." And when the clergyman tries to initiate 
him a little into what he believes to be a reason- 
able man's attitude towards those things, he is 
far from satisfied. " That's all very well," he 
objects; " but here am I at the most important 
moment of my life, when I am trying to make a 
clean start, and I have got to make a public 
confession of faith with all sorts of mental reserva- 

183 . 



Christianity in the New Age 

tions. I don't like it. Why can't I say straight 
out what you and I really do believe 7 " In the 
end he decides that it is worth while to equivocate 
a little in order to gain the spiritual fellowship 
he so much desires, and so this average man 
becomes a Churchman. But he is far from happy 
in his new life. The Church services worry him 
by their apparent irrelevance and insincerity ; 
the preaching he hears generally seems '' off 
the point " ; above all, the lack of fellowship 
distresses him, and the extraordinary keenness 
of '' good " Churchmen about questions of ritual 
and theology which seem to him of infinite un- 
importance. 

But while Mr. Hankey's picture is true to 
the life, his interpretation of the facts — an inter- 
pretation characteristic of a whole school of 
thought — is marred by a confusion which lands 
him in the very attitude he would most vehemently 
repudiate. He rightly contends that if the 
Church is indeed to be the Body of Christ among 
men, its standards, forms of worship, and rules 
of procedure must be such as to express in simple, 
unequivocal fashion the faith and aspiration of 
the average man who is not a theologian or an 
ecclesiastic, and who honestly desires ''to show 
a bit of Jesus to the world.'' But in proceeding 
upon the assumption that, in order to fulfil this 
condition, the Church must submit her formularies 
and rites to the judgment of the average man, 
he does less than justice to both. The Church 

184 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

exists not merely, or even chiefly, for the average 
man as he is, but rather for the man he is to 
become through a long process of discipleship. 
If the average man has the right to expect his 
first inarticulate gropings after a new life to 
find expression in the Church's worship and teach- 
ing, have the saint and the mystic no right to 
demand that their deeper experience should also 
find a voice in its witness ? If the first crude 
intuitions of the newly awakened must be reflected 
in its ordinances, may not the mature disciple 
expect a similar recognition of his profounder 
apprehension of truth ? The Church is not a 
religious club for the average man, or indeed for 
any other type of man ; nor is it merely the 
organised expression of the totality of the faith 
and convictions of any given age. It is a reservoir 
filled with the results of the spiritual strivings 
and triumphs of two thousand years. It en- 
shrines an experience which even its greatest 
saints have not fully explored ; and it calls the 
average man to that experience, knowing that 
it was to average men that Christ committed 
His cause, that it was average men He called to 
drink of His cup and be baptised with His baptism. 
Writers of Mr. Hankey's theological leanings 
tend to include under one category the average 
man's difficulties about such conceptions as 
" mystical washing away," " spiritual regenera- 
tion," and " elect children," and his difficulties 
about such matters as the Virgin Birth. But 

i8s 



Christianity in the New A^e 

the two classes are in reality entirely disparate. 
The first set of ideas, while expressed in a termin- 
ology which needs elucidation, represents vital 
processes, which the average man who is a true 
disciple has already experienced in part, and is 
intended to grow in day by day. They are 
therefore of tremendous importance for him, 
even though they appear unnecessarily puzzling 
at this early stage. To allow him to shelve them 
on the very threshold of discipleship as so 
much technical lumber, would be a betrayal of 
the teacher's trust. It is otherwise with the 
second class of ideas. They presuppose a nurture 
in Christian thinking, a trained sense of doctrinal 
values, and a delicate feeling for valid traditions 
which a neophyte coming into the Church straight 
from the outside cannot possibly have. To 
thrust them upon his unprepared mind at the 
threshold of initiation is to imperil his future. 
He must be allowed to postpone dogm^atic ques- 
tions until he has grown sufficiently into the 
spirit of Christianity to understand their im- 
port. They presuppose and demand an atmo- 
sphere in which he is not yet acclimatised. It 
is for want of recognising this that so many 
preachers and writers, especially since the war, 
have been betrayed into an ill-considered and 
almost hysterical demand for the removal of 
all dogmatic formulations from the Church's 
creeds and worship. Such a demand is futile. 
Doctrinal statement is an intellectual necessity ; 

i86 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

and if the average man is repelled by it, the 
obvious remedy, and indeed the only true wisdom, 
is to make it clear to him that the consideration 
of dogmatic questions belongs to a later stage 
of his development. To convince him of this 
may be difficult ; but since when has the Church 
been commissioned to avoid the path of difficulty, 
and to aim at securing herself against the risk 
of being misunderstood ? The average man will 
probably not relish being told to postpone his 
dogmatic investigations, and take the suggestion 
as yet another proof- of the incurable sophistry 
of a clerical caste. Well — that must be borne 
with equanimity. A tone of superiority is cer- 
tainly out of place. After all, few of us can aspire 
to be more than average men, or rather, there is 
fortunately no such thing as the monstrosity 
labelled '' the average man." Each man's ap- 
proach to Christianity is peculiar to himself, 
and each has his own contribution to bring to 
the common stock of Christian thinking and 
living. But using the term in its conventional 
signification to denote the man who comes 
to the Christian life from the outside with 
neither training nor inheritance of mature tra- 
ditions to aid him, we must not allow our sym- 
pathy to blind us to our duty. Our duty is not 
to vindicate ourselves at every step to his im- 
mature judgment, but to impress it upon him 
in all brotherliness and humility that in joining 
the Church he has committed himself to a fellow- 

187 



Christianity in the New Age 

ship of instruction as well as to a fellowship of 
service, and that his vow of discipleship pledges 
him to seek a growing apprehension of Divine 
truth. 

IV 

As we have seen already, it would be disastrous 
if the new and welcome emphasis upon disciple- 
ship were construed by the Church as a substitute 
for the duty of working out a theology as vital 
and relevant to the thought of our age as the 
theology of the Nicene Fathers was to theirs. 
To-day as never before, the Church realises the 
difficulty of such a task, and on every hand she 
is being betrayed into the vicious process of 
*' marking time,'' on the plea that the moral 
and spiritual demands of discipleship and the 
urgency of social reform have prior claims upon 
her energy. But that is a fatal policy, and will 
not stand examination for a moment. True 
discipleship carries within itself the imperative 
demand for that new thought of God we have 
discussed elsewhere, and no amount of social 
activity can reconcile men of to-day to the fact 
that the Church is shirking her specific business. 
Men everywhere are thinking about God as they 
have never thought before, and are more impatient 
and resentful than ever they were before against 
a Church that refuses to address herself to the 
issues which perplex them, and tries to put them 
off with the cut-and-dried formulae of bygone 

i88 

I 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

ages, or with the specious excuse that personal 
hoUness or social service is of far more immediate 
importance. We need a race of Christian teachers 
and preachers who are not afraid to go behind 
the creeds to the New Testament and the collec- 
tive Christian consciousness; and to work through 
the fundamental facts and conceptions of Chris- 
tianity, treating them as living questions, and 
not as matters which the fourth century has 
settled for all the ages to come. We want a 
theology that has due reverence both for the 
past and for the present, but which is neither 
antiquarian nor ephemeral — a theology born of 
personal vision and insight, yet never merely 
subjective because rooted deep in the history 
of the Church's growing initiation into the truth. 
It is only as we are striving after such a theology 
ourselves and, fearlessly facing the original prob- 
lems of Christianity, seek to interpret the historical 
creeds afresh in the light of a new age, that we 
may, with a clear conscience, ask the average 
man to postpone his own consideration of these 
matters to a later stage. And it is because the 
average man suspects that our advice to him is 
merely a subterfuge to cover our own intellectual 
laziness and timidity, if not downright incom- 
petence, that he refuses to accept it. It is an 
authentic Christian instinct that bids us put 
discipleship, and not assent to dogma, in the 
forefront ; but the moment we acknowledge that 
it is a man's personal allegiance to Christ as his 

189 



Christianity in the New Age 

Lord and Saviour, and not his theology, that is 
of primary importance, we thereby pledge our- 
selves to reconstruct our theology, and re-interpret 
the Church's creed in accordance with this central 
conviction. In other words, we put ourselves 
under solemn obligation to take our Lord's words, 
*' He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father,'' 
seriously, making it the fundamental axiom of 
our theological reconstruction, and seeking to 
interpret God to the mind of our age, not in 
terms of Greek metaphysics, but in terms of 
Jesus Christ. 

This takes us back to the neglected truism 
that the teaching function of the Church is 
essential to her very existence. Unless that 
function is recovered speedily, she will find 
herself plunged into endless difficulties during 
the period of reconstruction now before us. She 
will soon be confronted with men who have had 
a vital religious experience in the trenches, and 
who found in the camp services something that 
really corresponded to that experience — some- 
thing they can understand and appreciate and 
feel — in sharp contrast to the dull, unintelligible, 
decorous services they yawned through (or avoided) 
at home. Many of these men will wish to connect 
themselves more closely with the Church, and 
this will imply a legitimate demand for a change 
in her services. But woe unto us if we interpret 
that demand as a call to make our services as 
superficially attractive and intellectually thread- 

190 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

bare as the men find agreeable at this initial 
stage. The first thing to do is to make them 
realise that Christianity is a bigger thing than 
they thought, that it takes long growing into, 
and that the things they understand and care 
for least now may prove a year or two hence to 
meet their deepest needs, and fit their most vital 
instincts as the key fits the lock. Christianity 
exists to make the average man something far 
other than average ; to make of him a saint, 
a mystic, an experimental believer, a priestly 
intercessor — something, in short, that shall in 
very deed '* show a bit of Christ to the world.'' 
One of the outstanding marks of vital Christianity 
is its power to 'confer upon apparently common- 
place and poorly educated people the distinction 
of a penetrative spiritual intelligence. Every 
now and again one meets in crowded city streets, 
as well as in far-away mountain glens, humble 
'toilers who, in plain and homely speech, discourse 
upon the things of the Spirit with a breadth of 
outlook and a keenness of discernment that are 
at once an inspiration and a rebuke. Without 
knowing it, they have by long and patient ponder- 
ing attained to a degree of mental concentration 
and a clarity of spiritual perception which many 
a highly educated man might envy. Few of 
them have ever opened a learned book, yet they 
are skilled dialecticians of the soul, deep seers 
into Eternity ; and many a scholarly ApoUos 
has gone to school to some illuminated Aquila 

191 



Christianity in the New Age 

and Priscilla, and received his degree in Divine 
philosophy at their toil-worn hands. 

The Church is not merely a kindly spiritual 
home for average men, providing the sort of 
services they can appreciate, the sort of teaching 
they can understand, and the sort of fellowship 
that makes Church life attractive for them. She 
ought to meet every legitimate need — it is 
especially to her shame that she has so largely 
failed to create that warm atmosphere of fellow- 
ship for which men rightly crave — but her supreme 
function is not so much to satisfy felt needs as to 
open men's eyes to the deeper needs of which 
they have hitherto been unconscious. It is her 
duty to tell them that it is not by the homely 
kindness and comradeship that is already char- 
acteristic of them^ — ^beautiful though that be — 
but by the deeper, sacrificial communion of the 
broken Body and the shed Blood that they will 
become true soldiers of Jesus Christ and builders * 
of His Kingdom. If she has hitherto failed 
through ignoring the average man, she is threaten- 
ing to fail once more at this critical hour by 
sinking to his level. There are signs on every 
hand that, in her anxiety to win him at all costs, 
she is being betrayed into giving him the free 
and easy sing-song, the slipshod and offensively 
famihar prayer, the cheap, crude, slangy sermon, 
when she should be bringing to him the sanctuary, 
the altar, the subduing, recreating mystery of 
godliness by which men live and grow into the 

193 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

likeness of God. Nothing is gained by the 
growing custom of turning the mysteries of faith 
into the subject of a flippant '' undress '* debate, 
or of a much-placarded sensational sermon. We 
may imagine that by so doing we are liberating 
them from their hampering crust of conventionality 
and superstitious reverence; in reality, we are 
only cheapening and vulgarising them. To study 
the titles of certain popular religious books and 
pamphlets, or the placards which disgrace many 
a church door, is to be haunted by the suspicion 
that, in the vigour of our new crusade for reaching 
the average man, we are losing our sense of the 
sanctity of sacred things without gaining in either 
honesty or influence. Do we really imagine that 
such mysteries as the Incarnation, the Divinity 
of Christ, or the Life Beyond become less difficult 
and more convincing by being trafficked with in 
the market-place and fingered by every passer- 
by, or that intellectual honesty and courage are 
promoted by such a course ? One's experience 
of such methods would rather lead one to say 
that nothing could more effectively prevent 
honest thinking and fearless investigation than 
such a procedure. The average man, after listen- 
ing to an address in which, say, the question of 
the Virgin Birth is disposed of in a smart, gaily 
iconoclastic manner, may be agreeably impressed 
by the fact that, after all, the parson seems to 
think very much the same as he himself does ; 
but it is extremely unlikely that such a sermon 

N 193 



Christianity in the New Age 

will induce him to approach the Incarnation 
one whit more thoughtfully and honestly than 
before — the likelihood is that he will in the future 
approach it far less honestly. 

Let us make no mistake. We cannot hope 
to win a new generation by pandering to its 
prejudices and immaturities. Are we really pre- 
pared to maintain that St. Paul would have 
captured the world for Christ more surely and 
thoroughly if he had interpreted the Gospel in 
such a way as not to make it a stumbling-block 
to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks ? 
And if not, why do we imagine that we shall be 
more successful with a policy of accommodation 
than he would have been ? iVfter all, however 
sorely our creeds need re-interpreting and our 
theology reshaping, our first mission is to change 
not theologies but men. A thoroughly shallow, 
selfish, carnal man can accept an enlightened 
theology ; but no man in whom a great change 
has not taken place can accept a Gospel that 
bids him forsake all he has and take up his cross. 
For one man who rejects Christianity because 
he misunderstands it, ten reject it because they 
understand it too well — ^because they knov/ it 
is a call to the selfless and sacrificial life. Our 
first concern is with the Gospel ; and our theology 
will be adventurous precisely in proportion as it 
is the outcome of our passion for a Gospel which 
is neither calmly academical, nor sturdily 
''average," but a dynamic, subversive, mys- 

194 



Need for an Adventurous Theology 

terious, overwhelming force that seeks the salva- 
tion of the cultured eclectic and the plain average 
man alike by bringing a sword before it brings 
peace, laying the soul's citadel waste before 
building it again, and making life to come by 
the gateway of death. 



95 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CALL FOR ADVENTUROUS DISCIPLESHIP 

We are accustomed to say that uncertainty is 
the essence of true adventure, and that the 
Christian adventure is no exception to this rule. 
But while it is true that the man who has com- 
mitted himself wholly to God has committed 
himself to more than he knows, the uncertainty 
belongs to the way, and not to the end, of his 
pilgrimage. It is no part of the God-intended 
discipline of Christian knights-errant to lack a 
true vision of Him who is their goal. That 
vision may be brief as a lightning flash ; the 
soul may pay for one brilliant moment of seeing 
by long years of obscure night. Yet it is not 
the darkness of the way, but the brightness of 
the vision, that makes the Christian adventurer. 
What the soul has once truly seen it can never 
unsee, and our fleeting moments of spiritual 
lucidity give us the light whereby we walk all 
the days of our life. It is the characteristic 
vice of a sentimental religious romanticism to 
invest the hardness and hazard of the pilgrim's 
way with an entirely false significance, and thus 
to throw the whole conception of pilgrimage 
out of focus. To lose one's bearings or to sustain 

196 



Call for Adventurous Discipleship 

wounds in the Christian pilgrimage has no more 
value, taken by itself, than the strayings and 
tumbles of a spirited boy out on a holiday ramble; 
and so long as the would-be adventurer of the 
Spirit remains preoccupied with the twists and 
turns of the road, the real adventure has not 
so much as begun. He who is the Captain of 
our salvation, and therefore Himself the Great 
Adventurer, had very little to say concerning 
the piquant possibilities and thrilling risks of 
the way. Drawn by what He saw before Him 
in remorseless lucidity of vision. He set His face 
to go to Jerusalem; speaking now and then of 
the Cross that awaited Him, but hardly at all 
of the inconveniences and hardships of the road 
that led thither, and providing no foundation 
whatever for the romantic embroidery with 
which a certain school of religious litterateurs 
has tricked out the way of the Cross. He chose 
as His disciples men who bore not the faintest 
resemblance to the flushed, exalted figures which 
these writers depict for us. Blunt, straight men 
they were ; immune, indeed, from the theological 
and ecclesiastical conventions of Scribes and 
Pharisees, and from the bitter nationalism of 
the Judaeans, yet possessing all the prejudices 
and conventions of their own class, and burdened 
with the heavy, lumbering minds of men put 
early to hard and monotonous toil. They fol- 
lowed Him blunderingly and blindly, making 
every kind of mistake except the mistake of 

197 



Christianity in the New Age 

romanticism, hanging back at every unexpected 
turning, and impelled to go on only by their 
deep-rooted devotion to their Leader. And when 
Christ had risen, and the greatest of Apostles 
was born '' out of due time,'' it was not a rapt 
visionary, a mystic poet, a graceful knight- 
errant who won for Christianity a world-wide 
empire, but one Saul, a Pharisee, cradled in the 
most cramping system of traditions and con- 
ventions, a typical citizen of his world, combining 
the forensic temper of the Roman with the 
argumentative genius of the Greek and still 
remaining a Hebrew of the Hebrews. 

Our first step, then, must be to recognise 
that the -essential thing about the Christian 
adventure is not the element of uncertainty 
(though uncertainty always plays a large and 
important disciplinary role in it), but the adven- 
Htrer's personal vision of God — a vision fleeting, 
may be, and all too rare ; partial, certainly, and 
needing much constant correction and enlarge- 
ment ; but always authentic, dynamic, indelible. 
And having cleared our minds of the sentimental 
and romantic catch-phrases that go to obscure 
the central reality of the Great Adventure, we 
may profitably interrogate ourselves concerning 
our reluctance to embark upon it. True, the 
merely romantic interpretation of Christianity 
stirs a hidden chord in many, and not least often 
in the most unlikely quarters. It is the timid, 
middle-aged soul, fettered by dreary routine 

198 



Gall for Adventurous Discipleship 

and weakened by disillusionment, that is often 
most easily stirred by the note of romantic 
adventure. The unquenchable longing to escape 
from a machine-driven existence asserts itself, 
and though the enchained soul knows itself 
impotent to follow the call to freedom, that 
bitter conviction only goes to intensify the 
allurement of that call. But when the trappings 
and romanticisms are discarded, and the Great 
Adventure presented in its original form, the 
response is wanting. It seems too much like 
an invitation to exchange a life of dreary security 
and comfort for a life of equally dreary risk and 
discomfort. So long as the religious romanticist 
has the word, the adventure presents itself as 
an attractive pursuit, with just that spice of 
danger that is man's eternal lure. But seen in 
the dry light of truth, what appeared as an 
agreeably stimulating element of risk resolves 
itself into a depressing certainty of wounds, 
shame and loss. And while we have learnt to 
disregard pain and the loss of life itself on the 
field of earthly battle, we have not yet learnt 
'' to give and not to count the cost, to fight and 
not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek 
for rest, to labour and to look for no reward " 
in the Christian conflict. In the realm of spirit 
we remain enslaved by our craze for automatic 
safety devices, and our present-day instinct for 
corporateness adds one more such safety device 
to our already formidable outfit. 

199 



Christianity in the New Age 



That the new cult of the corporate Christian 
life represents a valid demand, need not be empha- 
sised ; but when, as is so frequently the case, it is 
coupled with a call to adventure, it is time to stop 
and think. There is such a thing, certainly, as a 
corporate adventure ; if the soul must be adven- 
turous, so must the Church. But the corporate 
experience rests upon the individual experience, 
and to bracket the two as equally important and 
primary is sheer confusion. The first belongs 
to the esse of the Christian life ; the second 
merely to its hene esse. That the soul should 
make the great adventure is absolutely essential ; 
that it should discover its relation to the whole 
Body of Christ is most important for a true in- 
terpretation of that adventure, and indeed neces- 
sary for the working out of its implications ; 
but essential it is not, and wherever the initial 
adventure has not been made, the corporate 
sense becomes a source of weakness and self- 
deception. It is in that case merely the religious 
form of that instinctive gregariousness which is 
man's greatest handicap in the search for truth. 
In first equating the corporate sense with in- 
dividual vision and then construing the corporate 
life as a state of club-gregariousness rather than 
as membership in the family of God, we lose the 
true idea both of spiritual personality and of 
spiritual fellowship. The call to a closer realisa- 

200 



Gall for Adventurous Dlscipleship 

tion of fellowship is sorely needed, but it is 
meaningless except as addressed to those who 
are already adventurers of faith. 

We may seek to brush this aside as a return 
to individualism, but we do not get rid of an 
inconvenient fact by labelling it with a discredited 
term. If the Church is founded upon the fact 
of Redemption and of man's response to it, it 
is founded upon the individual personality. Here 
lies the fundamental difference between the 
Church and an army. The individual soldier 
is a unit in the army ; but the individual Christian, 
while of course being a unit in the Church, is 
something far more than a unit. Wherever a 
soul has entered into true fellowship with the 
Father of spirits, thinking the thoughts of God, 
identifying itself with His purposes, surrendering 
itself to His guidance, there is potentially the 
Church. '' One person worships God, and no 
increase of numbers, no consecrated building or 
large assembly can add anything, ... A 
humble heart lifted anywhere in the name of 
Christ meets with God, and enjoys the fellow- 
ship from which all other fellowship should pro- 
ceed." * This can only be deprecated as in- 
dividualism if we choose to define the individual 
in eighteenth-century fashion as a self-contained 
and isolated unit. But surely it is high time 
for that phantom to go the way of all mythical 
lumber. When w^e speak of the individual, we 

* J. Oman, "Vision and Authority," p. 132. 
201 



Christianity in the New Age 

mean the individual in his place amid his fellows. 
And if we persist in imagining that corporate life 
is destructive of individuality, or rather that it 
demands the voluntary sacrifice of a man's 
individual life for the good of the community, 
it is because we tend to assign a purely biological 
significance to the unity of mankind, whereas 
its true significance is spiritual. It is a unity 
of individuals who are meant to know and under- 
stand each other, and to live in spiritual inter- 
communication. In such a community the in- 
dividual is not a means but an end ; it is only 
as each member is a complete and virile personality 
that he is able to influence his fellow-members 
and be influenced by them. Where individual 
development is sacrificed, there can be no question 
of influence, but only of hypnotism and obsession. 
In such a society the strongest personalities 
appear to dominate the rest, but in reality both 
strong and weak are dominated by the crowd- 
spirit, the community degenerating into the 
herd. 

It is here that the application of .war metaphors 
to the conception of the Church has worked much 
havoc. Such metaphors have of course a limited 
validity. It is obviously true that the Church 
should be a warrior Church, that her members 
should give their best to a common cause without 
a thought to safety or an eye to reward, and that 
she cannot afford to sit at ease so long as the 
forces of evil are arrayed against all that makes 

202 



Gall for Adventurous Discipleship 

life noble, pure and lovely. But when we press 
the metaphor beyond these limits, pour contempt 
upon the inward and individual significance of 
Christianity, sneer at " those who are only con- 
cerned with saving their own miserable little 
souls,'' and lay it down that the Christian soldier 
is only a unit in a great army, whose business it 
is not to worry about his apprehension of things 
unseen, but simply to take his orders and '' do 
his bit," we are introducing a confusion which, in 
the name of a more virile Christianity, will swamp 
what little Christianity we have. The true 
soldier's courage is a most noble and wonderful 
thing, but behind it lies a wave of patriotism 
that bears the whole nation upon its crest. When 
the soldier goes to battle he goes as one of a com- 
pany, or as the leader of a company. As he con- 
tributes the treasure of his courage to the common 
stock, it flows back to him enriched by the courage 
of every brave man who fights beside him. But 
the Christian adventure is, in Us initial and 
determining stage, a lonely business ; and the 
Christian fellowship we call the Church helps a 
man, and is helped by him, precisely to the extent 
to which his deepest experience has been " a 
flight of the alone to the Alone." 

The whole spiritual history of mankind is a 
commentary upon this axiom. The world's great 
spiritual leaders, healers and comforters have 
ever been those who derived their inspiration, 
not from the psychological stimulus of crowds, 

203 



Christianity in the New Age 

but from the mountain-solitudes of communion 
with the Eternal. Such were the best repre- 
sentatives of mediaeval sainthood. There is little 
about these gaunt and outre ascetics to commend 
them to our practical religious sense; yet, even 
while we dispose of them with such ready-made 
phrases as '' morbid asceticism/' '' exaggerated 
emotions," '' distorted outlook,'' and so forth, 
we are haunted by the suspicion that they suc- 
ceeded where we fail, that their lives had a 
force, a '' prick," a sheer palpable efficiency 
which ours lack. We strive, and strive vainly, 
to impress the world ; they impressed it without 
any striving — their one aim, indeed, was to be 
ignored by it. We shrink from the great, lonely 
experiences of the soul, fearing to lose our in- 
fluence over our fellows ; yet there never was a 
time when our influence as Christians was weaker. 
They rushed into the spiritual desert, urged by 
an unappeasable hunger for the dread solitudes 
of God, and, like George Fox, they instinctively 
*' spoke to all conditions" and had a magic key 
to the hearts of their fellows. Humble St. 
Benedict, starting '' a school in which man may 
serve God," achieved the education of Europe. 
Meditative St. Bernard, delighting in lonely 
rapture, pent back for years, with the granite 
dyke of his wonderful eloquence, the great in- 
tellectual revolution which broke him in the end. 
St. Catherine of Siena, well-nigh intoxicated 
with love of silence, faced Popes and Cardinals, 

204 



Gall for Adventurous Discipleship 

holding the honour of the Church in her emaciated 
hands, and quelUng forces that made the strongest 
men of the period shrink back. St. Teresa, 
glowing visionary, effected a practical reforma- 
tion which men of action had deemed impossible. 
These and many more of their type were men 
and women who cultivated a relation to God 
awful in its singleness. They saw Jesus with 
their own eyes, heard the word meant for their 
ears only, and dared to follow out the audacious 
logic, the tremendous dialectic, of such individual 
experience. They had seen Jesus at first hand, 
and once a soul has seen Jesus, life becomes a 
divinely simple and effective thing — an arrow 
flying straight to its mark. 

We might illustrate the same great principle 
from the history of the Anabaptists and the 
great spiritual reformers of that period. The 
Anabaptist communities, whatever their defects 
and extravagances, represented the fellowship 
of those who had come to know God at first 
hand, and to feel His regenerating touch. It 
is easy for advocates of the so-called Catholic 
Revival to be witty at the expense of those who 
made a deep, personal experience the foundation- 
stone of the Christian life and to speak of " prig 
factories." These early re-discoverers of the 
personal, experimental way to God were obviously 
one-sided in their presentation of Christianity, 
and exhibited the unlovely consequences of their 
one-sidedness ; but the side they emphasised 

205 



Christianity in the New Age 

was the vital side. It is ours to-day to add the 
social and corporate aspect to ^:heir unfinished 
vision ; to substitute it for that vision is sheer 
disaster. They dug out for us once more the 
only true foundation upon which a more Catholic 
conception can be built ; in spurning that founda- 
tion we are dooming the superstructure. 



II 

Moreover, in disposing of that foundation 
in the cheap and flippant fashion current in not 
a few quarters, we are taking it for granted that 
we are only dealing with a handful of misguided 
sectarians. In reality we are dealing with an 
instinct whose roots are deep in the original 
documents of the Faith, and with, a type of life 
that reflects the essential atmosphere of New 
Testament Christianity. It is not so much a 
question of doctrine and interpretation as of 
atmosphere, accent, emphasis. Behind these great 
spiritual individualists lies the Gospel landscape, 
as it were, and it is with that background that 
we must come to terms — everything else is mere 
surface criticism. As we read the story of Jesus 
in the Gospels *' with open face,'' we are im- 
pressed with His sharply individual treatment 
of those who came into touch with Him. The 
matchless tale of His miracles is surcharged with 
this quality. The hand of healing whose touch 
pierced through the leper's skin to his sore heart ; 

206 



Gall for Adventurous Discipleship 

the endearing name of Daughter to the woman 
whose innocent shame bade her hide in the crowd 
and touch His garments unaware ; the preHminary 
questioning in some cases, the instantaneous 
response to the faith of others — these are only a 
few reminders of the wealth of individual appeal 
which awaits the discovery of the patient student 
of the Gospels. The conception of individuals 
as units in a force, cogs in a wheel, means to 
another's end, is entirely alien to Jesus. So far 
from seeing men in groups and crowds. He did 
what we also do instinctively, once we forget our 
theory of corporateness — He sought to detach 
each man He met from the crowd, to see him 
as he was in the deep places of his soul, to under- 
stand not merely the needs and desires he shared 
with his group, but those that were intimately 
sacred to him alone. Men and women approached 
Him as units in a crowd, but the moment their 
eyes met His, they stood forth in all the sharpness 
of their inalienable individuality. Unmistakable, 
unforgettable, they stand revealed to us as no 
amount of mere description could reveal them. 
We know them through the medium of our Lord's 
sympathy and understanding as we know our 
nearest and dearest. 

And if we would regain the lost gift of appeal- 
ing to men, if we would attain to that living 
unity of fellowship which our barren reaction 
from a fictitious individualism is powerless to 
give, we must once more steep ourselves in the 

207 



Christianity in the New Age 

Gospels till we are re-acclimatised to their 
atmosphere. It is quite true that that atmo- 
sphere is something far other than the thin, 
trying air of Puritan or Anabaptist individualism ; 
yet no one can read the Gospels long or ponder 
them deeply without feeling that if Jesus was 
right, then the one thing that matters, as nothing 
else however important can matter, is that each 
soul for itself should come into living touch with 
God and hear His secret, individual word. 

So long as we think of the love of God as a 
vague general philanthropy, or conceive of it 
as a vapid, mystical infusion of the Divine into 
the human, we shall be inclined to deprecate 
any very strong insistence upon the soul's in- 
dividual relation to God, seeking rather to find 
its loyalty to God in its loyalty to the community. 
But the moment we begin to think of that love 
simply and concretely as it actually came to 
men in Jesus, the emphasis shifts. For in Jesus 
love began as a simple loyalty of affection to 
twelve plain men whom He had chosen to be 
His companions. He did not come to men 
with what we would call nowadays a programme 
of world-evangelisation. He had no plan of 
campaign, evolved no schemes, did not calculate 
even in the interests of the Kingdom : He simply 
loved. And He loved not a vague, dim mass 
of humanity, but men, women and children 
among whom His lot was cast, and, in a most 
intimate and individual sense, the twelve dis- 

208 



Call for Adventurous Discipleship 

ciples. He chose these twelve with a disinter- 
estedness which would strike us as the most 
wonderful thing in the world, were we not blunted 
to its significance by mindless familiarity with 
the narrative. He did not sit down and dehber- 
ately endeavour to select men who would be the 
most Ukely to further the interests of that Kingdom 
of God which He was sent to bring. We are 
accustomed to say that these twelve simple 
working-men founded the Church of Christ ; but 
that is not completely true. It was none of the 
twelve that created the Church as a world- 
conquering force ; it was Paul, the brilliant 
pupil of Gamaliel, adding Greek culture to 
Rabbinic theology ; and behind Paul stood such 
men as Luke, the beloved physician and expert 
historian ; ApoUos, mighty in the Scriptures ; 
and, greater than all, the author of the Fourth 
Gospel, with his profoundly philosophical and 
speculative endowment. There were men of 
the Pauline and Lucan type in the world in 
which Jesus lived; but He did not go out to 
seek them. Apparently, He did not do much 
seeking at all. He went wandering by the lake- 
side and saw Peter and Andrew, James and John, 
and asked them to bear Him company. 

This seems homely and commonplace enough, 
but it enshrines a whole Divine philosophy. To 
treat men as ends in themselves, never as means 
to what might be considered a higher end — that 
is God's way with us. His fundamental principle 

o 209 



Christianity in the New Age 

of love. Many of us like to enlarge upon the 
harshness and corruption of the Church of Rome ; 
but are we quite sure that we know the basal 
factor in her policy ? Is it not simply that Rome 
has exalted the utilisation of men as means to 
an external end to a fine art ? She is possessed 
of the evil spirit which looks upon men as so 
many pawns to be moved hither and thither in 
=^the ecclesiastical game. That spirit is not con- 
fined to Rome. It was naturalised in Geneva; 
it is witnessed to by the history of every Church 
and sect ; and it is the fundamental malady of our 
religious outlook to-day and the bane of our 
Church life. One need not go very far in any 
religious community to come upon that unlovely 
touting for members who are likely to be an 
asset to the cause — ^men with money or talents, 
personality or charm. It seems so natural and 
harmless to canvass and exploit our fellows in 
the interests of the Kingdom ; indeed, it seems 
a distinctly religious procedure. But it is essen- 
tially unchristian ; it is characteristically ultra- 
montane, though it appear in a hyper-Calvinist 
conventicle. It is the besetting temptation of 
those who are ambitious for Christ's cause ; it 
is threatening to strangle the life out of the 
Church to-day, and accounts for much of our 
spiritual failure. To use men as means is to 
be disloyal to Him who chose the dull and slow 
of heart, the ungifted and awkward, for their 
own sakes, and was loyal to them when they 



Gall for Adventurous Discipleship 

most retarded His cause and marred His work. 
He loved His own, and He loved them to the 
end. Love does not calculate, it does not scheme ; 
it simply loves and serves. 



HI 

The time has come for us to face the implica- 
tions of such a doctrine. If it means anything 
at all, it means that every man is intended to 
make personal experience of the love of God, to 
enter into a communion with his Maker in which 
no other can intermeddle, that his chief end — to 
use the memorable old words — is '' to glorify 
God and enjoy Him for ever.'' It means that 
it is our first business to seek this experience for 
ourselves, and our second business to witness 
to others concerning it. This does not imply 
a self-centred and isolated religion. The in- 
dividual, as we Vv^ell know, is not a self-contained 
unit. He is set in a community, and it is in and 
through that community that he will fully realise 
his personal destiny ; but he can only be of real 
help to the community so long as he does not 
put it into the place of that personal relation to 
a Divine Person which is his true life. His work 
for the community, so far from being the end to 
which he is to be subordinated, is a means for 
his perfecting, and through his perfecting for 
the perfecting of his fellow-members. This is 
unwelcome doctrine in an age in which the 

211 



Christianity in the New Age 

commonwealth of men has taken the place of the 
Kingdom of God, and a sentimental confusion 
has identified a man's personal with his selfish 
interests ; but it is the only doctrine that will 
avail to make the Church once more holy and 
Catholic, at once an ark of refuge and a fighting 
force. Protest as we will, the supreme need in 
the Church to-day is not for men willing to 
"do their bit,'' but for men whose contribution 
to the Christian fellowship will be their selves — 
their redeemed and consecrated personalities. To 
oppose such an ideal to corporate welfare is only 
possible when, as we have said already, the 
community is conceived of in biological and 
spatial terms. Once the essentially spiritual 
nature of the corporate life is recognised, it 
becomes clear that the man who sees God face 
to face on the lonely mount of vision is thereby 
nearer to his fellows and more closely identified 
with the common life of the community than the 
most heroic toiler in the plains without such 
moments of vision. It is when, shutting the 
door, he prays to his Father who seeth in secret 
that his finger is on the pulse of humanity and he 
knows himself one with his brethren. 

The New Testament Church is the classic 
illustration of this principle. There never was 
a Christian community which exemplified the 
common life and the corporate consciousness so 
triumphantly. Its members called nothing their 
own, and ate bread in common with gladness. 

212 



Gall for Adventurous DIscIpleship 

They felt the sap of the one Vine pulsing through 
each and all of its branches ; they saw each other 
in Christ, and, living unto Him, lived for each 
other and for the community with an instinc- 
tive and complete loyalty. And when the first 
flush of new life had ebbed and dissensions 
marred the unity of the redeemed, Paul and the 
Pauline circle perpetuated the Apostolic spirit. 
" Who is weak, and I am not weak ? who is 
offended, and I burn not ? '' * Yet this same Paul, 
whose sense of spiritual solidarity was so vivid 
as to be a constant pain to him, was the 
preacher of a Gospel of individual redemption. 
Penitence, faith, reconciliation, the inward wit- 
ness, mystic union — all these realities, however 
interpreted, can only be experienced by the 
individual, and not by the group as such. The 
Church of Paul was an organic unity. When it 
met for worship, each member had something 
to contribute to the common stock. /' When 
ye come together, every one of you hath a psalm, 
hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, 
hath an interpretation." | But behind this pool- 
ing of spiritual riches lay the dread solitude of 
those who are apprehended of Christ in the deep, 
lonely places of the soul. Our meetings for 
prayer and worship lack the unifying note. We 
come encased each in his particular religious 
mood and theological bent. If one member tries 
to make his contribution to the common stock, 

* 2 Cor. xi. 29. f I Cor. xiv. 26. 

213 



Christianity in the New Age 

others are sure to find it uncongenial and even 
jarring. As a matter of fact, in spite of our 
reiterated emphasis upon corporateness, we re- 
tain the most unlovely aspects of individualism. 
We have allowed cheap criticism to filch our 
treasure from us. We have fallen a prey to a 
superficial theory of the community, which calls 
itself Catholic, but is in reality pagan and, in 
fundamental essence, materialistic. Common sense 
ought to have taught us long ere this that to 
decry the individual is to belittle the community, 
and that to minimise the importance of personal 
sanctity is to kill the Christian society at its very 
root. There is an altar in men — a deep and 
majestic place — where the soul transacts with 
its God, and life is cleansed and kindled with un- 
earthly flame. To-day we tend to live in the 
laboratory and the kitchen ; our concern is 
to " keep the home fires burning.'' But it is the 
altar that makes the man ; and if the altar fire 
is allowed to go out, what was once a meeting- 
place of earth and heaven, pulsing with angelic 
life, becomes a pathetic survival. 

There is much work to do for and in the 
Church, and to eyes newly opened to the world's 
need the one important thing seems to be to 
enrol workers and still more workers. But if 
the altar makes the temple, then its services 
must be brought to the testing of the altar fire. 
Morbid spiritual self-culture is obviously fatal, 
and working for others is in many cases a more 

214 



Gall for Adventurous Discipleship 

potent means of grace than a thousand sacra- 
ments. But having granted that, we must still 
suspect the external activity — -however useful 
and beneficent — which renders the soul distracted 
and unconcentrated, unfitting it for its supreme 
business. We are not concerned here with the 
humble and irksome duties of life, which may be 
as straight a road to God as prayer, but with self- 
imposed tasks often born of the -fatal lust to 
be busy at all costs. St. Ambrose retails the 
quaint old belief that when eaglets have arrived 
at a certain age, the parent bird takes them to the 
edge of the rock and holds their heads up to the 
sun. If they can endure its blaze without blink- 
ing, it knows them for true scions of the eagle 
race ; if they wince and close their eyes, it drops 
them over the edge of the abyss. Which things 
are a parable. The adventurous soul is the soul 
that has the courage to relinquish every task, 
however good in itself, which unfits it for that 
sustained gaze into the face of God that is its 
very life. 

This takes courage. There is something attrac- 
tive to the noble soul about a religion that is 
chivalrous and full of humanitarian passion, 
expressing itself in social crusades and social 
service. Compared to it, a religion which puts 
the individuaFs inward relation to God and com- 
munion with Him in the forefront seems at first 
sight valetudinarian and selfish. Yet a deeper 
view shows it to involve the utmost courage 

215 



Christianity in the New Age 

and self-abnegation. The moment we strip such 
terms as penitence, conversion, prayer, mystic 
union of their conventional trappings, we are in 
an august and lonely region where only the brave 
can venture. With all our vaunted joy in risk 
and our gospel of the adventurous life, we are 
afraid of the inner world as our fathers were 
not. And even if we were as courageous as they, 
it still remains that to draw near to God in spirit 
and in truth is a thing to make the bravest falter. 
It belongs, not to the inherent tenderness of the 
Gospel, but to our vulgarisation of that tenderness, 
that we can speak of man's communion with God 
as a religious and psychological commonplace, 
and run lightly up that Hill of God which the 
saints trod in holy fear. Dora Greenwell, in 
speaking of '' the parsimony of grace, '* treats of 
the mystery and augustness of that communion 
from an angle we neglect to our loss : — 

How few from age to age are called into close 
neighbourhood and nearness with God ; how few even 
among these chosen to remain with Him in unbroken 
spiritual communion ! . . . Only from time to lime 
does a heart touched by His highest influence awake to 
wonder, to adore, to see Him as He is. Yet the river 
of God is full of water, with Him is the residue of the 
Spirit. Spiritual creation must be as easy to God as 
is natural, yet man seems kept at a great distance from 
God purposely, and no doubt in mercy. . . . " What 
has close friendship with God ever proved to man but 
a costly, self-sacrificing service ? " The eminent favour 

216 



Gall for Adventurous Discipleship 

of God, as shown in large spiritual graces, seems to 
expose the recipient to such grievous outward persecu- 
tions, to such insidious attacks, such protracted secret 
trials, that I have long learnt to acquiesce in the hiding 
of God's power, and to look upon it, as I have said, as 
one of the deep secrets of His mercy.* 

How little we know of this shrinking from 
intimate commerce with God ! Yet no man ever 
truly saw God who did not shrink from that 
which such a vision involves. We take the 
caricature of personal religion, the man who 
delights in pious exercises but often lives as if 
he were ignorant of the very elements of justice 
and mercy, and then speak of the selfishness of 
looking after one's own soul and leaving the world 
to perish. Such cheap taunts may do very well 
for the street-corner orator ; that they should 
have crept into our books on religious reconstruc- 
tion is deplorable, and one finds it hard to believe 
that men who have themselves approached the 
inner sanctuary can descend to them. The cry 
of the hour is that the Church must vindicate 
her right to exist by making a genuine contribu- 
tion to the world's life. True ; but her supreme 
contribution to the world's life is the man whose 
feet stand within the gates of the spiritual temple, 
whose life is hid with Christ in God. Such men 
are like the ten righteous that might have saved 
Sodom — their influence is incalculable. Nor are 
they only to be found among the scanty ranks 

* " Colloquia Crucis," pp. 122-123. 
217 



Christianity in the New Age 

of born mystics, as we tend to imagine. History 
shows how men of average gifts and practical 
turn, men of dull imagination and unremarkable 
personality, have heard the call of God, and 
leaving the comfortable ruts of conventional 
living have risen to dynamic sanctity. There 
is no company so representative of every imagin- 
able type of humanity as the glorious company 
of saints. There is no congregation so common- 
place that the fire of God cannot kindle it to 
splendour, no soul so dark that the call of God 
cannot make it illustrious. The world demands 
many things from a feeble, halting Church, and 
not a few of its demands are entirely valid ; but 
its deepest, though often inarticulate, cry is for 
men who have seen God upon the mount and 
bring the light of the Sanctuary down to earth. 
In our hurry to respond to the social challenge, 
we have all but forgotten the supreme debt we 
owe to our fellow-men, the fundamental charity 
out of which all charities spring. We are not 
brave enough to leave the market-place and 
enter the secret chamber that we may sanctify 
ourselves for the world's sake. We need the 
poet's astringent message transmuted into the 
highest spiritual terms : — 

For this is Love's nobility — 
Not to scatter bread and gold, 
Goods and raiment bought and sold ; 
But to hold fast his simple sense, 
And speak the speech of innocence, 
218 



Gall for Adventurous Discipleship 

And with hand, and body, and blood. 
To make his bosom-counsel good. 
He that feeds men serveth few ; 
He serveth all that dares be true. 



IV 

*' After a few months' experience of conditions 
out here/' wrote an officer at the Front, *' I 
think a good many people have come to the con- 
clusion that there is only one thing worth living 
for, only one thing worth thinking about — and 
that is God/'* If this testimony is repre- 
sentative of a widespread movement — and 
there is every ground for believing that it is — 
why do not men who are thus exercised about 
the great issues of life betake themselves in 
larger numbers to the Church and its teachers ? 
Mr. C. H. S. Matthews finds the reason for this 
reluctance in the lack of frankness and inward- 
ness which characterises the bulk of our 
preaching : — 

Men want something more than a tradition that 
has become for them the empty form in which men of 
other ages have tried to explain their apprehension, 
under other conditions of life and knowledge, of the 
living God. They would rather have an honest attempt, 
however inadequate, to express a genuine experience 
of our own day than the most eloquent exposition of 
the established orthodoxy by a man who shows no signs 

♦Quoted in " Faith and Freedom," p. 5. 
219 



Christianity in the New Age 

of having himself wrestled with God for the truth he 
has to proclaim. That is the real reason why a book 
like Mr, Wells's '' God the Invisible King " has a sale, 
and arouses an interest among the laity which no book 
by any officer of the Church could hope to rival. It is 
a book pecuHarly easy to criticise. Its philosophy and 
its theology are astonishingly inadequate, but it is 
obviously the sincere utterance of a man who speaks 
out of a real and vivid experience of the living God, and 
therefore it commands attention in a world where men, 
however blindly, are seeking the living God.* 

One is not quite sure if it is correct to say- 
that it is the vital experience behind Mr. Wells's 
book which made it so amazingly popular. It 
is at least open to question v^^hether the book 
v^ould have been quite so eagerly bought, had 
its author not been a popular novelist whose 
religious convictions had undergone a complete 
metamorphosis. Yet the main issue remains 
the same : it is the preacher or writer who can 
speak out of a vital experience of God that 
finds a response. And it is this vital element 
that is largely lacking in present-day preaching. 
The average sermon does not spring straight 
fromlife,or make a direct appeal to that mysterious, 
deep life that slumbers in man. Comparatively 
few preachers, indeed, speak out of a spiritual 
experience so dynamic that it creates its own 
message, as it were, and speak in the sure convic- 
tion that deep in the hearer's soul lies the hidden 

* " Faith and Freedom," pp. 6, 7. 
220 



Call for Adventurous Discipleship 

seed, the inward witness, that can respond to 
the message. There is a good deal of thoughtful 
and impressive preaching, a good deal of able 
reconstruction of the historical background of 
texts, of practical application, persuasive appeal 
and suggestive reflection ; but one seldom feels 
that the preacher is speaking of that which he 
has seen and known and his hands have handled, 
and that his words are words of life, words kindling 
life, words that have hands to grip and feet to 
pursue. The preacher's sense of the fact that 
the stolid, conventional assembly sitting before 
him was created for the express purpose of drink- 
ing deep of the very life of God, that in each 
soul there is something waiting to be born, some- 
thing so potent that it needs but a touch to set 
it free, seems to be weak and fitful. And what 
is true of preaching is equally true of the minister's 
private intercourse on things spiritual. He may 
be a good fireside apologist, a stimulating coun- 
sellor, and sympathetic comforter ; but one 
misses the direct impact of life upon life. And it 
is largely for want of this vital quality that 
ministers have become dissatisfied and disillu- 
sioned, and tend to blame the defects of their 
ecclesiastical system, or the conditions under 
which they have to work, for that which nothing 
so external can remedy. 

' Thus a chaplain with the Mesopotamian Force, 
writing on ''The 'Failure' of the Church," 
finds one cause in the fact that the average man 

221 



Christianity in the New Age 

trained in a Protestant atmosphere is ignorant of 
the true priestly function of the clergy : — 

I often wonder how many priests of the Church 
of England have found any great demand for their 
sacerdotal services to wounded and dying in the heat 
of a battle. For my part, I regret to say that (except 
in a few cases) I have been able to do little more than 
the work of a stretcher-bearer ; simply because men 
did not understand one's priestly function and powers. 
In all cases they appreciate the " padre " as a preacher- 
man, a sport, a.nd a friend. Otherwise his position 
conveys nothing to them. And this is because they 
do not know. And here they miss the comfort and 
discipline of religion.* 

This is a typical utterance, and it is pro- 
foundly symptomatic. We are not concerned 
here with the question of the validity or other- 
v^ise of sacerdotal claims. The point is that if 
a*^ priest cannot represent the deeper aspects 
of man's life in Christ as a mere " padre '' — *' a 
preacher-man, a sport and a friend " — he v/ill do 
well to consider whether he has not missed his 
calling as a priest. Whatever be the importance 
of Sacraments, if the ordinary layman who really 
knows his Lord cannot, during an informal talk 
with a wounded or dying man, speak the word 
of witness which, halting and defective though 
it be, will vindicate itself as coming from the 
deep and calling to the deep, Christianity is 
hardly worth troubling about. That a man 

* The Church Times, August 30, 1918. 
222 



Gall for Adventurous DIscipleship 

should exercise the office of a priest without 
having first made proof of the Divine efficacy 
of the word spoken by the wayside, and reahsing 
that he who witnesses to what he has himself 
experienced has in very deed the Word of God 
in his mouth, is amazing. One cannot conceive 
what intelligent sacramental teaching such a 
priest could give. 

The truth of the matter is that until we have 
recovered that deep, experimental knowledge of 
God, lacking which neither preacher nor priest 
has any right to his office, it is futile to argue 
about Sacraments, or, indeed, about anything 
else. Once the preacher speaks out of his intimate 
experience, and speaks not to the crowd but to 
the soul, with an individual, dynamic, spiritual 
accent, there will be no occasion to talk of the 
failure of the Church. For the failure of the 
Church is bound up with the failure of individual 
discipleship, and where there is no life, the Sacra- 
ments are a delusion. 



223 



CHAPTER IX 

THE CALL FOR AN ADVENTUROUS CHURCH 

I 

In emphasising the call for an adventurous 
Church, we are at one with many outside her 
borders who have declared that they would 
gladly cast in their lot with a Church ready to 
do and dare to the uttermost, but cannot see 
why men of virile fibre and high ideals should 
be expected to attach themselves to an institu- 
tion whose sole concern seems to be to keep 
itself alive — a task w^hich indeed absorbs what 
energy it still possesses. " We have learnt," 
they say, '' that there are things more precious 
than life, that to live for oneself and one's own 
safety and well-being isn't a man/s life at all. 
And we naturally expect the Church to lead 
the way in unselfishness and courage. We expect 
her to live not for her own comfort but for the 
world around her, to lead in every righteous 
crusade, to inspire social reform, and to be the 
spokesman of the neglected and oppressed. But 
wherever we look the Church's main concern 
seems to be with her rolls of membership and 
her balance-sheets. So long as the financial 

224 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

year closes with a credit balance and the member- 
ship is fairly well maintained, the average con- 
gregation congratulates itself upon its prosperity. 
The fact that it is surrounded by a population 
living in social and spiritual darkness, and that 
it has done little, if anything, to uplift, comfort 
and enlighten those outside its doors, and to 
help them to regard the Church as their natural 
refuge and home, does not seem to trouble it 
Its horizon is bounded by such questions as 
pew - rents, collections, ecclesiastical schemes, 
church socials, and the thousand and one other 
matters which pertain to the conventional life 
of a modern congregation/' 

Such criticism is, of course, less than just in 
as far as it takes the form of a sweeping general- 
isation ; yet no one can pretend that it does not 
embody a truth which might well fill the Church 
with searchings of heart. It cannot be denied 
that her besetting sins are timidity and selfish- 
ness. Her fear of opposing vested interests and 
powerful institutions, of alienating those who 
have in the past been among her most liberal 
financial supporters, and of offending pious folk 
whose conception of their Christian duty does 
not seem to include human sympathy and social 
justice, is a dark blot on her escutcheon. Her 
confirmed tendency to degenerate into a religious 
club for a coterie of mediocre, respectable folk 
whose one ambition is to be comfortable in the 
spiritual life as in everything else, to mix only 

p 225 



Christianity in the New Age 

with people of their own social standing, and 
to see their organisations financially prosperous, 
repels high-minded men who would otherwise 
seek light and leading at her hands. Whatever 
the Church is, she is not adventurous; and the 
best instinct in man demands that those who 
name the name of Christ take the high places 
of the field and launch forth boldly into the deep. 
Nor has the searching fire of war done more up 
to the present than reveal the Church's weak- 
ness. It has not kindled a fire in her midst. 
It has not inspired her to break through the con- 
ventional conception which makes her first task 
to consist in getting people to " come to church.'* 
In one of the National Mission leaflets, the writer, 
after referring in moving terms to the heroism 
and self-sacrifice of our soldiers, reaches this 
conclusion : '' Let us therefore lay aside all 
scruples begotten of timidity, and with great 
boldness make a personal resolution to live as 
Catholic Christians in the best sense of that word, 
and from this day forward let us say our night 
and morning prayers, and say grace before and 
after our meals wherever eaten.''* That such a 
leaflet should have been published and circulated 
is surely a lamentable sign, and no one can wonder 
that men and women who have faced reality, 
to however limited an extent, turn away with 
contempt from a type of Churchmanship which, 

* Quoted by Miss A. Maude Royden, " The Hour and the 
Church," p. 73. 

226 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

in face of the heroism of the trenches, exhorts 
good Christians to have the great boldness " to 
say grace before and after meals wherever eaten '* ! 

But if the Church's critics, in laying a merciless 
finger upon her lack of adventurousness, have 
done her a service, it is otherwise when they 
proceed to define what precisely they mean by 
an adventurous Church. For most of them the 
adventurous Church is the popular Church, i.e., 
a Church which, while by no means in favour 
with the moneyed classes or the prosperous 
bourgeoisie, is understood and appreciated by 
the masses of the people, who find in her the 
redresser of their injuries, the champion of their 
rights, and the provider of the kind of teaching 
and sentiment, work and play, fellowship and 
mutual support, which they crave for. They ask 
how it is that Church work and organisation lack 
that warm life, absolute unanimity of aim, cheer- 
ful good fellowship in which all personal differ- 
ences and predilections are forgotten in the joy 
of working together for a common cause. They 
wonder why the consciousness of a common foe 
to fight and a common end to attain does not 
impel the Churches to unite and present one un- 
broken front. 

But in defining the adventurous Church as 
a Church of the masses, and demanding her 
corporate union with a view to her increased 
popularity and effectiveness, we are in reahty 
denying her adventurousness. For a depleted 

22^ 



Christianity in the New Age 

and dismembered Church to cut herself adrift 
from a middle-class constituency, whose attach- 
ment is palpably weakening, and make a bold 
appeal to the masses, takes a certain degree of 
resolution and hardihood, and may involve some 
unpleasantness and controversy ; but it is scarcely 
an adventure : it is essentially a counsel of com- 
mon sense. The same might be said of corporate 
union. Motives of prudence and the instinct 
of self-preservation are all that is required to 
effect such a. union, and the time is fast approach- 
ing when it will take far more courage and adven- 
turousness — for the Free Churches, at any rate- 
to keep separate than to unite. This does not 
imply, of course, that a Church which attracts 
the democracy and is bent upon corporate union 
is necessarily actuated by prudential and utilitarian 
motives. On the contrary, one sees the time 
coming when the Church will be truly one, and 
truly a Church of the people, as a consequence 
of its fearless obedience to the Spirit's leading. 
In the present instance, however, we are dealing 
with a certain popular conception of what the 
Church's policy should be, and in that particular 
conception her popular appeal and her endeavours 
towards corporate union are frankly based upon 
utilitarian considerations. Seeing that it is not 
the external action but the spirit which counts, 
such a conception, whatever truth of a lower 
order it may embody, is not the conception of 
an adventurous Church. The adventurous Church 

228 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

may attract the masses for a season, even as her 
Master was heard gladly of the common people 
for a season ; but if she be indeed a Church of 
Christ, she will be no more permanently popular 
than He was. She will consent to be neither 
an almoner nor an arbitrator. Again and again 
she will have to refuse the request of him who 
would bid her command his brother to share his 
inheritance with him, and will speak of the 
forgiveness of sins to him who asks freedom from 
physical disability or release from hampering 
conditions. She will indeed labour to secure 
for men the best possible environment ; but she 
will refuse to agree with the social enthusiast that 
the slum and the village hovel are the only exist- 
ing types of bad environment, insisting that 
the sleek comfort and superficial religiosity of 
the middle-class church-going family, and the 
humanistic culture and refined self-centredness 
of certain academic circles, provide an environ- 
ment fully as vicious, and far more difficult 
to counteract or redeem, as the open scandal 
of mean streets and brutalised agricultural dis- 
tricts. She will be bold to declare that her 
mission is to the rich as well as to the poor, to 
the respectable as much as to the outcast, and 
that the needs of the first are possibly even more 
urgent than the needs of the second. She will 
maintain, in the face of opposition and contempt, 
that if it is her high privilege to feel for the 
struggling ranks of Labour and bring a warm 

229 



Christianity in the New Age 

and active sympathy to its just aspirations, it is 
no less her duty to sympathise with the difficulties 
of the capitalist, and to help him also in his 
equally hard struggle to keep his soul alive. 
If she is under stern obligation to denounce the 
vices of the rich and to condemn the exploiter 
of his fellows, she is no less solemnly bound to 
convict King Demos of his sins. 

Such a Church cannot hope to be popular. 
Like her Lord, she will be set for the fall and 
rising again of many, and for a sign which shall 
be spoken against. Nor will her attitude towards 
the question of corporate union commend her 
to the great mass of men. Against all popular 
demands, she will deprecate a union based upon 
compromise, indifference, or utilitarian considera- 
tions. She will judge that he who holds his dis- 
tinctive convictions in Christ's name, that is, 
in the spirit of Christ, is a truer friend of unity 
than the man who clamours for a compromise in 
order that the Church may be more outwardly 
impressive and efficient. She will declare that 
confidence in the power of an outward union is 
nothing else than confidence in the flesh ; that 
it is, in essence, materialistic and not spiritual. 
She will remind men that our Lord found a 
united ecclesiastical organisation and flung fire 
and a severing sword into its midst, and that in 
all ages it has not been the Church's true prophets 
and leaders who have laboured to conserve her 
outward unbrokenness or gloried in her imposing 

230 



The Call for an Adventurous Church 

size. She will contend that a corporate union 
of sects, so far from being necessary to that true 
unity of insight, love and witness which is Christ's 
purpose for His Church, may, under certain 
circumstances, be the worst enemy of that unity, 
leaving the world impressed, perhaps, but as 
worldly as before. 



II 

The fact is that outside critics of the Church, 
while often worth listening to, cannot speak 
the final word, for the simple reason that they 
do not and cannot know what the Church is in 
her essential nature and Divine calling. They 
recognise that she is not what she ought to be. 
They have their own vision of the ideal Church, 
and it is well for us to pay heed to that vision. 
Yet, in the last resort, they have no positive 
contribution to make to our problem. They 
recognise the Church's disease, and their diagnosis 
is penetrative, and, in the main, correct. It is 
when they attempt to prescribe that they go 
astray ; for their fundamental conception of the 
Church is at fault, and their suggested reforms 
proceed upon a basis which, however valid in 
its place, is not the rock upon which Christ built 
His Church. And the reason why so many 
inside the Church are ready, not merely to accept 
their strictures — which we ought to do in all 
humility — ^but to put their suggested reforms 

231 



Christianity in the New Age 

into execution, is that the majority of Church 
members have lost sight of the New Testament 
doctrine of the Church. They have forgotten 
what the Church is in her essential nature, and 
what she stands for. This is scarcely their 
fault ; it is one more result of the decay of the 
Church's teaching ministry and of the vulgarisa- 
tion of her life. 

The average man tends to regard the ideal 
Church as a religious club — not, indeed, in any 
exclusive or '' West-Endy '' sense, but very much 
after the pattern of the war-time Y.M.C.A. 
Now, speaking theoretically, there is no reason 
whatever why a .Church conceived as a club 
should not prove a very helpful institution ; 
why, for example, it should not radiate that 
atmosphere of brotherly love and comradely 
co-operation which is so much needed in this 
cold world of ours. But as a matter of hard 
fact, wherever any particular congregation 
models itself upon the club principle, it at 
best proves but a very second-rate edition of 
the secular club or association. There are not 
the same energy and good management, the 
same friendliness and loyalty, that mark the 
best clubs ; and in the end such congregations 
generally fall upon evil days, for the simple 
reason that the people who are attracted to them 
by an innate club instinct discover that it is so 
much easier to run a club, and so much pleasanter 
to belong to one, when no attempt is made to 

232 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

mingle spiritual teaching with social activity 
and enjoyment. Men cannot long remain loyal 
to such a congregation, and their disloyalty is a 
witness to the haunting power of a truer ideal. 
It is quite beside the mark to compare, as is 
constantly done, the contrarieties and dissensions 
which mark the life of the Church with the 
unanimity and hearty good fellowship of other 
associations working for a common cause, such 
as the Woman Suffrage movement. These asso- 
ciations work for ends which cover only a rela- 
tively small part of life, are easily defined, 
and admit of little misunderstanding. Their 
members join them, not because they wish to 
learn how to be loyal to those ends, but because 
they are already convinced that those ends are 
for their own good and for the good of the race, 
and their one desire is to work for their realisation. 
Obviously, given such unanimity of aim, these 
societies will run smoothly and be characterised 
by a high degree of good fellowship and self- 
denial, for they operate only along certain definite 
and circumscribed lines upon which all their 
members are already agreed. What differences 
emerge are differences of detail and method, and 
any disagreement that arises is born, not of out- 
raged convictions, but of a sense of personal 
injury. This means that, provided its members 
are enthusiastically convinced of the main issue 
and, like sensible folk, agree to suppress purely 
personal considerations in the interests of a 

233 



Christianity in the New Age 

common cause, such a society is bound to run 
harmoniously and effectively. 

But when we turn to the Church we are deaUng 
with a society entirely different in kind. The 
Church is not an association of people holding 
the same views on certain subjects and largely 
alike in temperament and tastes. The Church 
is the society of those who profess to have entered 
upon a new type of life, and are being acclimatised 
by degrees to a new atmosphere — a process not 
always agreeable to behold. The Christian 
society is all-inclusive. Indeed, for wealth of 
human contrasts, there is nothing more striking 
than an average congregation. It includes adults 
and children, the simple and the learned, the 
vigorous and the feeble, people of every variety 
of training, taste, talents and outlook. They are 
not convinced supporters of a clear-cut system, 
or associated to carry out a stereotyped pro- 
gramme. Their conception and interpretation 
of Christianity are largely in flux and as varied 
as their minds and temperaments, and the bond 
of their union cannot be summed up in constitu- 
tions and by-laws. Strangely mingled and blown 
together from all quarters of the moral and 
spiritual globe, they are united, at the lowest, 
by their conscious need of God ; at the highest, 
by their common love of Jesus. When the critic 
tells us that that love ought to make them united 
in spirit and overflowing with good will towards 
all men, we of course agree, and there is no con- 

234 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

gregation that has not in its midst those who 
have so learned Christ. But the Church is not 
a ready-made institution. It is a body in the 
making, a society of those who are learning, 
awkwardly and blunderingly, to walk in newness 
of life, who are growing slowly into apprehension 
of a truth whose fullness is beyond their highest 
attainment, and who are being initiated into a 
love that redeems by blood. Add to these 
learners — many of them woefully backward and 
dull — the merely nominal members who inevit- 
ably attach themselves to such a society and 
become its reproach and scandal, and it follows 
that the Christian Church cannot be compared 
to any other association — that, indeed, its 
assimilation to the club type would be its final 
condemnation. For the Church represents a 
kingdom extending over the whole of life, 
and a truth which needs every type of mind to 
contribute to its right understanding. It is, 
therefore, precisely as her members gain strong 
individual convictions as to the application of 
Christianity to given departments of life, and 
intimate individual insight into some aspect of 
the truth, i.e., as they enter the region where 
disagreement and contention are Almost in- 
evitable, that they grow into true membership 
of Christ's Body. 

It is hard to make the mind of to-day realise 
that outward unity and concerted action — the 
things it admires so much in an army-— are not 

235 



Christianity in the New Age 

essential marks of the Church of Christ ; that, 
indeed, they may be signs of decay and death* 
It is at this point that most present-day Church 
Union movements are based upon unsound prin- 
ciples. They assume that Churches have the 
right, and even the duty, to compromise upon 
matters of doctrine and spiritual conviction ; with 
a view to what is termed '' the more effective 
mobilisation of Christian forces/' But the unity 
which Christ pleaded for does not come by any 
kind of compromise. If the underlying sense of 
oneness in Christ Jesus, the spiritual union of a 
common redemption and a common galling, 
cannot make itself manifest in presence of widely 
differing convictions on faith and order, each 
denominational body respecting the convictions of 
the other but remaining unflinchingly loyal to 
its own vision, no scheme of corporate union 
will bring true unity one whit nearer. The Free 
Churches in England have before them a scheme 
for federation as distinct from corporate union, 
one of the main practical considerations being 
the prevention of that overlapping which has 
long been a scandal in town and country alike. 
It is by no means the first attempt to cope with 
the problerfi, but all such endeavours have been 
more or less ignored by the parties concerned. 
One of the aims of the new federation scheme 
is to provide machinery which cannot be ignored, 
i.e., a Council consisting of authorised repre- 
sentatives of the denominations concerned. This 

236 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

means that what practically amounts to compulsion 
is to be employed to secure what sheer Christian 
decency, to mention no higher motive, ought to 
have secured long ago without any outside 
intervention. 

There is always a tendency on the part of 
ecclesiastics to emphasise what must be called 
the prudential aspect of Church Union, or of 
Federation, urging upon Churches animated by 
no spontaneous prompting that union spells 
greater influence in public questions, a more 
popular appeal, and the effective mobilisation of 
spiritual forces. But a genuine union movement 
can only spring from a vital impulse within the 
membership of the Churches ; and such an 
impulse does not come into being at the sug- 
gestion of a committee. It can be preached as 
a spiritual crusade ; it cannot be engineered into 
existence. Least of all can it be evoked by an 
exposition of the advantages of union. It is 
not the promise of heightened prestige that will 
weld the Church into one : it is the call to sacri- 
fice and to suffer, A union entered upon under 
ecclesiastical pressure and from motives of utility 
is destined to break down. The utmost it can 
do is to impress a certain section of the public, 
and one cannot think it will be a very large 
section. The " man in the street '' is far too 
shrewd not to see the real motive, and will 
frame his estimate accordingly. The de- 
liberations of Churches are common property 

237 



Christianity in the New Age 

nowadays, and every newspaper reader knows 
that it is a sense of decline and the melan- 
choly testimony of half-empty churches and 
waning statistics which have given such desperate 
urgency to the union question. Should federa- 
tion be achieved, every intelligent man will 
regard it as a counsel of despair which, even 
if carried with enthusiasm at headquarters, is 
adopted with only scant good grace locally. 
It requires considerable naivete to imagine that 
such men will mistake a policy of expedience for 
the expression of Christian love. 

One would not wish to minimise for a single 
moment the scandal and stain of denominational 
rivalry, or the ugliness of the conventional atti- 
tude of '' Church '' towards " Dissent." Nor is it 
possible to exaggerate the evil of a loveless and 
self-absorbed Church, split by petty internal 
quarrels and heedless of the need of a world of 
men. But the remedy for these evils lies not 
in sinking to the club level, or in seeking to enforce 
external union. That is not the way of adven- 
ture ; it is an illicit short cut. The way of 
adventure is infinitely harder. The adventurous 
Church is the Church which, in days when far 
other ideals prevail, has the courage to remind 
herself and others of her true character as the 
Body of Christ, and of her primary function as a 
witness to a new life and to the fellowship of 
the redeemed. 

When we turn to the New Testament, we find 

238 



The Call for an Adventurous Church 

that while no other book in the world lays such 
commanding emphasis upon the individual and 
inward character of true religion, it is also em- 
phatically the book of the Church. Its back- 
ground is the Christian community — a community 
founded upon the redeemed personality, yet 
something far more than a mere association of 
persons ; an organic whole, whose corporate life 
is something over and above the sum of the lives 
of its members ; the body of believers, who can 
give to God together that which not the greatest 
of them can give to God by himself. The primitive 
Church as reflected in St. Paul's Epistles was no 
ideal society. It was torn by violent and often 
ignoble dissensions, marred by spiritual crudeness, 
weakened at times by an explicitly carnal temper, 
imperilled by frequent relapses into pagan im- 
morality; it was, in short, open to the gravest 
and most unanswerable criticism. Yet St. Paul, 
whose pen set down its weaknesses and defections 
with such remorseless fidelity, sees it as the 
Body and Bride of Christ, an extension, as it 
were, of the Incarnation. Christ is her Head ; 
her life is inextricably intertwined with His 
Divine life. Such a Church-consciousness lies at 
the very root of New Testament Christianity, 
and our present-day criticism of the Church fails 
because we have no great constructive doctrine 
of the Church to determine and guide it. It is 
only as we see her defects as blemishes and wounds 
in the Body of Christ that our criticism will be 

239 



Christianity in the New Age 

profound and searching enough to probe her 
sore. There is no room for unreaUty here. To 
see the Church as the Body of Christ does not 
mean to ignore her actual condition, but to 
discern the Church that is yet to be actuaUsed. 
We are not yet a Church ; we are growing a 
Church, just as we are slowly evolving a soul. 
The Church that is, exists for the sake of the 
Church that is to be ; and it is only in the name 
of the Church that is to be that we may presume 
to lay the finger of blame upon the Church that 
is. There is only one hope for the Church, and 
that is her growing to be actually what she is 
already potentially and ideally — the Body of 
Christ bearing His marks, having fellowship in 
His sufferings, caring more for His travail than 
for a creditable balance-sheet, concentrating 
not upon the social amenities of the ^common 
room, but upon the sacrificial fellowship of the 
altar. 

This conviction pledges us to the difficult and 
unpopular task of witnessing to the New Testa- 
ment doctrine of the ChurCh, and seeking to 
build up the Christian society in conformity 
with it. The programme — if such it can be called 
— seems dry and uninviting by the side of social 
campaigns and other popular movements ; but 
it enshrines that victorious, creative principle 
which in Apostolic times built a new world out 
of the ruins of an old one, and has been the soul 
of every vital and fruitful movement throughout 

240 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

the Church's history. We stand for a Church, 
not "broad-based upon the people's will/' but 
deeply grounded in her Lord's Being — a Sacra- 
mental ■ Church, exemplifying^ within the State a 
new type of life destined to supersede the State. 



Ill 

To say that the primary function of the 
Church is worship is to run counter to present- 
day feeling ; yet, did we only go deep enough, 
we would surely recognise that the instinct for 
worship lies deep in humanity, and is often not 
merely present but clamant when outward appear- 
ances least betray it. But, as we have pointed 
out before, there is a widespread indifference to 
worship, due to the fact that while preaching, 
social effort, and other Church activities have 
to a greater or lesser extent kept pace with the 
times, public worship has remained stagnant, 
and largely tends, not merely to bore, but actually 
to irritate, the man of candid mind who is not 
versed in its traditional phraseology, and whose 
sense of reality is outraged by its convention- 
alities. Yet worship is the natural expression of 
the redeemed life ; it rises and falls with the 
flow and ebb of the soul. Wherever formalism, 
or a false sense of corporateness, has weakened 
the individual's hold upon God, there worship is 
not the spontaneous outcome of life but a theo- 
retical problem. In such a case discussion and 

Q . 241 



Christianity in the New Age 

small reforms are of little avail, and the " new *' 
Catholicism is as powerless to raise the dead as 
the '' old " Protestantism. It is at such times, 
when life has failed at its sources, that attempts 
are made to introduce a liturgical form of worship 
into the Free Churches. That there is something 
in a liturgical form of worship which meets a 
real need, and saves from many devotional ex- 
cesses and excrescences, will be conceded by 
most thinking men. Many not trained in liturgical 
forms are welcoming them now as an important 
element in worship ; but the conviction remains 
with them that the minister who surrenders his 
right to voice the soul of his people in favour 
of a purely liturgical service, is proclaiming his 
bankruptcy and committing the Church to im- 
poverishment and retrogression. We have to 
beware of trying to meet a fundamental evil 
with such superficial remedies as a change in the 
form of worship. That change stimulates the 
soul is, of course, a psychological fact ; but here 
as everywhere it holds that we must first make 
the tree good and the fruit will take c^re of itself. 
Given a Church that realises her responsibility 
as the awakener and nourisher of spiritual life, 
worship will once more become a living spring. 

An Anglican chaplain, commenting upon the 
fact that class prejudice and snobbery disappear 
when men are actually facing the foe, but reassert 
themselves in exact proportion to the men's dis- 
tance from the firing line, remarked that the 

242 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

reason why the Church is torn and weakened by 
petty disputes and mean rivalries is that she has 
never really '' gone over the top." The ignoble 
dissensions which flourish in the atmosphere of 
her ordinary services would soon disappear — 
they do, in fact, disappear — the moment she goes 
forth to war. Let her set herself to tackle 
seriously the great problems of poverty, ignor- 
ance and vice, and good-bye to all petty wrang- 
lings ! Lifelong prejudices and antagonisms have 
a way of melting into thin air when the servants 
of Christ meet at the deathbeds of the poor to 
join in challenging the grim forces of evil that 
threaten the life of the nation. This contention, 
however, while expressing an obvious truth, 
rests upon a false conception of worship. To 
assume that the regular ordinances of the Church 
are a shallower thing than its philanthropy, or 
even its evangelism, is to stand on dangerous 
ground. Did we but realise it, there is nothing 
more wonderful in a world full of wonders than 
a company of human beings lifting their hearts 
to God in unity. There is nothing more tran- 
scendently wonderful than a body of believers 
met to adore and praise their Lord and Saviour 
— nothing more fit to make wise men tremble 
and strong men bow their souls in reverence. 
Nor is true worship the tame and static thing 
which this chaplain, and not a few others, assume 
it to be. Where it is static it lacks the specific 
quality of Christian worship. For Christian wor- 

243 



Christianity in the New Age 

ship is not the luxury of emotional souls : it is 
a battleground. Wherever a soul, or a company 
of souls, holds real converse with God, there rages 
a battle far more critical and momentous than 
any fought in the slums or in the gilded haunts of 
vice. Who can presume to estimate the Divine 
resources set in motion by one genuine prayer, 
or the hostile powers let loose against the 
praying soul ? Had we but eyes to see and ears 
to hear, we could not enter the humblest Christian 
assembly without seeing the air thick with wings 
and hearing the clash of contending forces. And 
if a worshipping assembly is a thing of majesty, 
it is also a thing of loveliness. Could we but 
become conscious of the real worship of the 
Christian assembly, could we but hear the mighty 
and moving flow of the deep current of penitence 
and adoration, pleading and thanksgiving, aspira- 
tion and high resolve, that runs on beneath the 
audible service, our criticism of its weakness 
would be lost in an intense desire to make some 
real contribution, however slight and imperfect, 
to that hidden stream. There is ample room 
for frank and searching criticism of our public 
services ; but such criticism is valid only in the 
measure in which we have a right conception of 
the nature and end of true Christian worship. 
Failing that, it is a sheer impertinence. 

One does not need to borrow the grudging 
eye of the hostile critic, in order to realise that 
our public worship is not the thing of awe and 

244 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

beauty which God intended it to be. We have 
lost that sense of wonder which is the soul of 
worship. The mysteries of the spiritual world 
do not dilate our hearts and bow our spirits, and 
the reason why our worship is so feeble and 
passionless is because it is not born of a genuine 
vision of the God who can only be seen with 
eyes of wonder. The Wesleys set the Christian 
heart of England a-singing, because they had 
recovered the sense of spiritual wonder for their 
generation. Their hymns throb with adoring, 
joyous, passionate worship, because they are 
the lyric expression of wonder. " Where shall my 
wondering soul begin ? '' is the question that 
pulses through them — a question the average 
Christian does not dream of asking to-day. For 
with all our sharpened discernment and heightened 
sensibility, we bring dull and dreary eyes to the 
mystery of a Redemption whose roots are lost 
in the abysmal being of -God, and of a Grace that 
is the very flower of His holy Heart of Love. 
Nor is our worship eloquent of spiritual joy. 
It is, indeed, strangely impotent to convey the 
beauty and joyous vitality of Christian disciple- 
ship. Men who chance to come to our services 
and meetings find, instead of the sparkling cup 
of life abundant, the stale lees of mechanically 
accepted religious conventions. Instead of a 
freshness like that of sunlit, pulsing seas, they find 
a dullness and flatness of spirit more akin to the 
weariness of the worldling than to the immortal 

245 



Christianity in the New Age 

youth of the soul that lives in God. In place of 
a breadth and spaciousness as of the open sky, 
they are conscious of a protracted horizon — a 
pettiness of soul which repels their most generous 
instincts. They hear prayers for the prodigal 
recited in the prim and frigid tone of the Elder 
Brother, and psalms of feasting sung by men 
whose pinched aspect spells starvation. 

And while the air is full of schemes and sug- 
gestions for the relief of this famine of worship, 
some of the methods recently tried in various 
quarters are based upon genuine needs. The 
movement, especially, known as the Fellow- 
ship of Silence is full of promise. Silence is 
not merely an important part of worship : it 
is its vital atmosphere, the background against 
which the spoken word utters itself with com- 
pelling power. Corporate silence, rightly under- 
stood, is a strong, soldier-like attitude, having 
nothing in common with the vacant day-dreaming 
and deliberate self-hypnotism that are substituted 
for it in certain latter-day cults. It is not merely 
a subduing and stilling of the soul under the 
power of God's presence : it is a going forth of 
the whole personality towards God in active 
resolution and aspiration. It is a great and 
sorely neglected discipline, making a highway 
for God through the wilderness of our vagrant 
thoughts and wayward emotions. It reveals 
what speech conceals, eating away our hidden 
unrealities, showing us our bankruptcy, revealing 

246 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

the emptiness that so often underhes our gUb 
devotions. 

But the adventurous Church will go behind 
schemes and suggestions to the fundamental 
lack in our worship. In the last resort, men 
remain untouched by awe and wonder and un- 
irradiated by joy, not because the conventional 
forms of worship do not give scope to these 
qualities, but because they have never really seen 
God as their Maker and Redeemer. It was never 
more true than to-day that while many have 
heard of God by the hearing of the ear, few can 
say, " Mine eyes have seen Thee.'' The Church's 
supreme task, no matter what her friends advise 
or her enemies reproach her with, is to tell men 
that there is a direct, immediate, transforming 
vision of God ; that they can see Jesus and be 
clothed with His deathless life — ^nay, that to see 
God thus is man's first business, beside which all 
worldly gain and all merely external morality 
or philanthropy are as dross. The Church that 
dares to utter this burden, regardless of the jibes 
and reproaches she is sure to incur from those 
who construe her mission in social and philan- 
thropic terms, is the Church that will conquer 
with the victory of God. Once she has really 
staked her very existence upon the great adven- 
ture, she will no longer ask: How large is my 
membership ? How many scholars can my schools 
boast of ? How can I fill my buildings and keep 
my funds in a flourishing condition ? Her great 

247 



Christianity in the New Age 

questions will rather be: How many within my 
pale know God in any deeper, more dynamic way 
than as a good, kind, almighty Being, concerned 
with their temporal welfare, and possibly a few 
urgent spiritual needs ? How many have so seen 
Jesus that they have indeed become other than 
they were ? How many of my workers are 
dominated by a vision which sees, beyond philan- 
thropic and religious activities, a Kingdom 
which is peace and joy and love in the Holy 
Spirit ? How many of those who have come 
within the range of my influence have been stirred 
to pant after God as the hart panteth after the 
waterbrooks ? The ages wait for the Church that 
can look upon the man who asks for a fair chance 
in life, and dares to say to him first of all, '* Thy 
sins be forgiven thee " ; who can face the masses 
that come to her for material relief but care 
little for their inward misery, and say boldly, 
'' Silver and gold have I none ; but such as I have 
give I thee : in the name of Jesus Christ of 
Nazareth, rise up and walk/' 

We are told again and again that men nowa- 
days are temperamentally averse to the inward 
and worshipful side of religion ; that the only 
way to approach them is through their social 
sympathies. That is not so, however. The 
human heart has not lost its ancient craving 
for a God to worship and adore. Not long ago 
a clergyman noticed five rough men who on a 
rainy night had dropped in to a popular service. 

248 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

They evidently felt supremely uncomfortable in 
their unaccustomed surroundings, and tried to 
relieve their feelings by whispering, chuckling, 
fidgeting about in their seats, showing in every 
possible way their not ill-natured contempt for 
the whole proceedings, and finally walking out 
in the middle of a prayer to the great relief of 
their neighbours. The following week the clergy- 
man, in paying an evening call on one of his 
parishioners, met one of those five men on the 
stair. He was living in the house, and just 
about to leave for the Front. The clergyman 
invited himself to his room for a free' and easy 
chat, and was greatly surprised when the man, 
gulping down his shyness, asked him to pray. 
He did so, and then his host told him how " queer '' 
he and his mates had felt that night in church, 
sitting among all those '' toffs '' who knew exactly 
what to do. They felt glad to get out of it, 

but " We wouldn't mind praying and all 

that sort of business if we knew a bit more about 
it. There's something in it, you know. We 
weren't brought up religious, never bothered 
about God ; but we've often said to one another. 
This sort of life isn't half good enough. You 
know what I mean." Wherever one goes, in 
train or omnibus, club or workshop, one comes 
across men and women discussing eagerly, and 
often with an unashamed wistfulness, the deep 
things of reUgion. Is it possible to know God, 
to hear His voice, to be conscious of a call from 

249 



Christianity in the New Age 

the deeps to the deeps, to see with a clearness 
that cannot be denied the things eternal, to 
possess a new power, a new motive, a hidden, 
living spring of joy and healing which sweetens 
all bitterness and makes the wilderness of life 
to blossom as the rose ? These are the .questions 
that meet us on the lips of not a few whom 
theorists write down as impervious to the mystical 
aspect of religion. 

And in answering these questions through 
her worship, the Church must, as we have already 
said, put the sacramental and the sacrificial 
element into its very centre. For the vision 
must begin in the household of faith. Though 
the moving of a leaf in the garden may reveal 
God to the soul as effectively as a sermon, yet 
neither the ministry of nature nor the spoken 
word is the deepest channel of that revelation. 
It is not with the eye of the mind that we see 
God, but with the love of the heart ! 

Here, O my Lord, I see Thee face to face ; 
Here would I touch and handle things unseen. 

It is through a Sacrament which represents God's 
uttermost self-giving — through a Divine Act 
in which the floods of our devotion and con- 
secration are unsealed, a^s the greater floods of 
Christ's mighty passion beat upon the gates of 
selfishness and low desire — that we shall see God 
and live. 



250 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 



IV 

Nor can worship alone create and sustain 
that vision on a large scale ; * it must be con- 
joined with the preaching of the Word. History 
makes short work of the contention that preach- 
ing " may be necessary in a weak and languishing 
state, but it is an instrument which Scripture, to 
say the least, has never recommended." f Wher- 
ever worship has been disjoined from preaching 
for any length of time, it has degenerated into 
mechanism and superstition, taking on grotesque 
forms and, in not a few instances, actually pro- 
moting profanity rather than reverence. Christian 
opinion has always swung to extremes in its 
estimate of the importance of preaching. On the 
one hand, it has relegated the preacher to the 
lowest place in the economy of the Church, and 
assented to conditions under which pulpit genius 
could not come to its own ; x)n the other hand, it 
has made of its places of worship mere '' preach- 
ing-stations,'' put the sermon at the centre of 
worship — if worship, indeed, it could be called — 
regarded what is the heart and soul of worship 
as mere '' preliminaries/' Both extremes are 
detrimental to true worship. In the one case, 
worship becomes unintelligent, and crawls blindly 
where it ought to soar ; in the other, worship 

* That it can do so in individual cases is not denied, 
t" Tracts for the Times," quoted in J. H. Blunt's " Direc- 
torium Pastorale," p. 99- 

251 



Christianity in the New Age 

is swamped, not necessarily by intellectual in- 
terests — the type of preaching which reduces 
worship to an irksome accessory is not nearly 
as intellectual as it seems — ^but more often by 
a preoccupation with the romantic and emotional, 
if not sentimental, aspects of religion. 

We have dealt elsewhere with the importance 
of the pulpit as a teaching institution. Here we 
are concerned with the relation of the Preacher 
to the life of the Church. There are signs of a 
revival of the tendency to consider preaching 
as an art and a profession, and to advocate a 
class of pulpit specialists analogous to the Preach- 
ing Orders in the Roman Catholic Church, or, at 
least, to set men of commanding pulpit gifts 
free to serve the whole Church, instead of con- 
fining their influence within the bounds of in- 
dividual congregations — a course which for long 
has been the custom in Wales. A strong point 
in its favour is the stimulus it gives to a truly 
prophetic ministry. We need the preacher who, 
untrammelled by previous knowledge of his 
audience, shall utter the word the Lord has 
put into his mouth, without stopping to 
wonder if anyone present is ripe to receive it. 
Such a preacher will, for example, voice a stern 
and searching Divine demand, and the frivolous 
woman he does not know and cannot see from 
the pulpit will so respond that her past is a 
dream, and her life begins from that moment. 
Had he seen her, let alone been acquainted with 

252 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

her, he might have toned his message down to 

her supposed capacity, and she would have 

remained as she was. It is for lack of such 

preaching that many a God-haunted soul does 

not get out of the twilight, and many a striving 

spirit lingers behind its destiny. To speak the 

word which the soul did not dream of, but which 

none the less it recognises immediately as the 

key-word of its life, to send forth the fiery arrow 

of God that speeds straight to an unseen mark, 

to utter the vision, though it be as to the blind 

— that is the type of propheteia for lack of which 

whole fields ripe unto harvest remain unreaped. 

And yet, in spite of this, the tendency to 

pulpit specialism is to be deprecated. The 

Church is never left without prophets to whom 

no ordinary rules apply ; and these should be 

liberated to follow their calling. But to create 

a class of mere preachers would be to create a 

type of preaching perilous to the preacher himself, 

and, in the long run, injurious to the hearer. 

The preacher who does not live in close contact 

with a definite community, and who comes into 

touch only with those who are attracted by his 

preaching, tends to become hard in proportion 

to his skill in rousing the emotions, and shallow 

in proportion to his constant occupation with 

the deep, prophetic aspects of religion. Except 

in rare cases, the preacher's calling is to be a 

pastor as well as a prophet, and a priest far 

more than a mere religious consultant. His 

253 



Christianity in the New Age 

privilege is to preach as a pastor ; that is, 
straight out of his intimate and sympathetic 
knowledge of his own people. The modern 
tendency is for preachers to address themselves 
either to a section of their congregation — that 
section which responds to their message and 
invites their personal friendship — or to that 
mythical monster called " the modern mind/' 
Theoretically speaking, their interests and sym- 
pathies range over a far wider sphere than those 
of their predecessors ; in reality, their scope is 
often far narrower than that of many an old- 
time parish minister who lived among his people 
and knew them intimately and lovingly. Men 
of that time had a grip and a '' bite " in the pulpit, 
a mellowness of sympathy and a shrewdness of 
judgment, which present-day preaching largely 
lacks. Nothing, indeed, is more characteristic 
of the modern ministry than its poor skill in the 
cure of souls — an art which neither pastoral 
visitation nor private consultation, neither the 
Bible Class nor the Confessional, can teach, but 
which is the secret of those who really live with 
souls, sharing their joys and bearing their sorrows. 
It is for want of such long and patient living 
alongside of their people that preachers of to- 
day are lacking in genuine insight into concrete 
moral and spiritual difficulties. 

Our increasing anxiety to draw " outsiders '' 
into the Church has made the preacher's position 
doubly difficult. It is so easy for preachers of 

254 



The Gall for an Adventurous Church 

popular gifts to gain an audience, and at the same 
time lose a church ; to lecture, rather than 
preach, on popular topics so interestingly and 
piquantly as to disappoint and, in the end, alienate 
those who come to church for spiritual reinforce- 
ment, teaching and comfort. He succeeds in 
attracting non-churchgoers, but he has lost that 
Christian community atmosphere which is his 
most powerful instrument for deepening and 
spiritualising that attraction. There is no other 
way of reclaiming a neglected child than by 
bringing it into a true family atmosphere. What 
it needs is a home ; you cannot win it by re- 
manding it to a workhouse and instructing the 
chaplain to give it weekly lectures on gentleness 
and affection. The preaching that merely gathers 
an audience must fail unless it has the spiritual 
family behind it. The preacher who does not 
build a church writes his message in water. He 
has a duty to his own people which no amount of 
enthusiasm for the unchurched masses can absolve 
him. His first task is to prophesy to the dry 
bones — to the conventional, worldly church mem- 
bers that are his cross ; to break his heart over 
them, to spend upon them some of that passion 
and persuasiveness he is so ready to pour out 
upon those who are not of his flock. This duty 
does not interfere with the wider ministry to 
which he is equally called ; on the contrary, 
to neglect it is the surest way to hinder that 
wider ministry. The Church has suffered more 

255 



Christianity in the New Age 

than many are ready to admit from the perversity 
of preachers who imagine that it is over the bodies 
of their people, so to speak, that they can best 
march to the conquest of the masses. 



V 

All this does not imply, as many seem to 
think, a narrow '' conventicle ideal,'' which con- 
strues the Church as a " little Bethel " for a few 
pale and pious souls, regarding a small member- 
ship as the outward and visible sign of an inward 
and spiritual grace. What it does imply is a firm 
resolve to appeal to what is at once the deepest 
and the most universal instinct in man — ^his 
affinity for the living God, and to recall men 
from the surface life of the senses and the brain 
to their hidden Centre. To say that this narrows 
the Church is a libel on mankind. The Church 
that resolutely stands for the spiritual first, and 
for social interests only as the natural outcome 
of a truly spiritual conception of life, may not 
appeal to the masses in the sense of gathering 
large crowds (except to hear preachers of out- 
standing ability) ; but it will appeal to the best 
in every man, and her very existence will be a 
wholesome prick, a haunting reminder, in the 
minds of thousands who never darken her doors. 
To insist that mass-attraction is the criterion 
of the Church's health is to fall back into that 
vicious habit which sees the supreme object of 

256 



The Call for an Adventurous Church 

a Church in touting for members ; in other words, 
in struggling to keep alive and vigorous. Such 
a Church deserves to die. But once we recognise 
that the purpose of the Church is not a continual 
membership campaign, but to serve the world 
in Christ's name, and that her best service — the 
service which she alone can render — is to bear 
living witness to man's new life in Christ Jesus 
and to incarnate that witness in a community 
which may be relatively small but must be 
genuinely Christian, the question of attracting 
the masses sinks into sheer irrelevancy. The 
true Church will be alert and aggressive. She 
will use the best insights and instincts of the age, 
speak to men in the language of the day, and 
proclaim a Gospel to which nothing human is 
alien. But her first concern will be, not to 
vindicate her life, but to live it. She is first a 
witness, and only second an apologist. Her 
ministers are not primarily organisers and masters 
of ceremonies, who can turn their congregations 
into cheerful clubs with a craze for small philan- 
thropies ; they are not even prophets or teachers 
merely, but priests of a holy community. They 
are there to build that Jerusalem which will be 
the praise of the whole earth. Only let it be 
built truly and well with the stones of sacrifice, 
and every road thereto shall resound with the 
tramp of pilgrim feet. 

It is out of the Church's deepest life that her 
social crusade will spring. To-day she is asked 

R 257 



Christianity in the New Age 

to take her rightful place at last as the leader of 
humanitarian crusades, the champion of the 
poor and weak, and the terror of wealthy evil- 
doers. The demand is a righteous one, and it 
is to the Church's shame that it still remains a 
mere demand. But the adventurous Church, 
while responding to it, will also insist that judg- 
ment must begin with the House of God. It is 
not the dishonest company promoter, the trafficker 
in human beings, the wealthy brewer and the 
conscienceless capitalist who loom most largely 
in her membership ; but the petty profiteer, the 
dishonest tradesman, the conscienceless artisan, 
the small employer who is a bully and a skinflint, 
the business man who takes advantage of his 
customers' ignorance. It is with them she will 
deal first. This is not a question of comparing 
the sins of petty defaulters with the crimes of 
rich oppressors. The point is that these petty 
defaulters are to be found in large numbers inside 
the Church, and that it is her duty to address 
herself to them. Such a course demands courage 
of a type almost defunct in these days, when we 
need the support of big movements and influential 
platforms to stiffen our backbone sufficiently to 
denounce evil. It involves the kind of preaching 
that will, in some cases, leave the preacher wonder- 
ing how much longer he will be allowed to occupy 
his pulpit. It may end in the Church having to 
go into the wilderness. Nothing strikes one as 
more ominous than the silence of the Church on 

258 



The Call for an Adventurous Church 

such a subject as profiteering, coupled with the 
persistent tendency of the pulpit to denounce 
social evils whose representatives or advocates 
are rarely found within a place of worship. The 
need is for preachers who will make their own 
people understand that social service is not 
primarily running clubs' and institutes, sitting on 
municipal committees, or working in connection 
with social organisations ; but doing honest work 
— the best that training and diligence can produce, 
and the most useful that is within the workers' 
capacity. The preacher who is not afraid to 
tell his young people that to do no work, or 
to do one's work badly, perfunctorily or super- 
ficially, is to defraud the community and sin 
against God and man, and who will persist in 
preaching this bracing doctrine even though it 
means that the best of his young people decide 
to attend extra evening classes instead of church 
clubs and societies, is a true prophet, and does 
social service of the best type. The same may 
be said of the preacher who attacks boldly the 
only kind of competition that is inherently evil 
— competition in spending. Who does not know 
the good church-going father of a family who 
makes £800 a year more or less dishonestly, but 
would infinitely prefer to make ^^200 a year 
honestly, did not his womenfolk insist on '' climb- 
ing " in the social scale and being at least as well 
dressed and as luxuriously housed as their neigh- 
bours ? The Church that sets her face Uke a 

259 



Christianity in the New Age 

flint against a pseudo-humanitarian conception 
of life which regards the minimum of work and 
the maximum of money and pleasure as the 
summum bonum, holds that it is the State's chief 
function to relieve the individual of responsibility, 
and expects State and Church to unite in making 
moral grit unnecessary by removing awkward 
temptations out of people's way, is the truly 
adventurous Church. 

To say that the Church exists to witness to 
a new life and to witness to it first of all by 
living it, is to say that she is pledged to sacrifice. 
Those who read the many articles on the 
defects and failings of the Church which appear 
almost weekly in our newspapers, written for 
the most part by thoughtful laymen, must be 
struck by the fact that these writers very rarely 
mention Jesus or His Cross (except as a symbol 
for sacrifice in general), and by their almost 
unanimous insistence upon a teaching ministry 
which shall make Christianity both reasonable 
and popular. " Religion,'' says one of them, 
" must be taught as intelligently as any science 
if it is to be of any service to man." If one were 
to reply that the kind of religion that the Church 
stands for — the religion of Jesus Christ — is not a 
thing that can be '' taught " in the intellectuaUst 
sense of the term, nor a thing that is ''of service 
to man " ; that it is a life, a power which does 
not wait upon man's suffrages, but appropriates 
him rather than is appropriated by him, one 

260 



The Call for an Adventurous Church 

would probably be written down as a narrow 
fanatic. And the first lesson our young leaders 
and prophets have to learn is to be content to 
be accounted mediaeval and fanatical by men 
of really fine and lovable spirit, in sympathy with 
much that Christ lived and died for. This is 
harder by far than to endure the contempt and 
hostility of men of coarse fibre and evil mind, 
who lack all instinct for the things that are lovely 
and of good report ; but it is the only way for a 
Church that has taken up the Cross. This is a 
sacrifice that makes no dramatic appeal, excites 
no sympathy ; evokes only impatience, antagonism 
and contempt. It is so hard, indeed, that it 
can only be made in union with Him who plumbed 
its bitterest deeps. To combat the good which is 
the foe of the best takes courage of the noblest 
type, the courage of true love. 

To-day the Church's path is hid in mist. 
Only one thing is sure : the Cross waits behind 
the dim shadows. She will not go very far before 
she will be called to sacrifice. During a certain 
public discussion on the proposed Free Church 
Federation, a leading representative of one of 
the Churches concerned tried to reassure those 
who were shivering on the brink that entrance 
into the Federation involved '' no sacrifice what- 
ever '' of denominational characteristics ; it was 
nothing more alarming than a scheme for mutual 
reinforcement and collective effectiveness. Un- 
wittingly the speaker laid his finger upon the 

261 



Christianity in the New Age 

most damning factor in all such schemes. The 
Church is still seeking to strengthen and enlarge 
herself with the minimum of sacrifice. The 
union she strives for is not the meeting of brothers, 
in which much is joyfully sacrificed and love the 
only end ; it is the amalgamation of rival firms 
who know themselves too weak to continue rivals. 
Her evangelism is not a selfless, brave witness, 
born of pure love to God and man, but an accom- 
modation with a view to popularity. It is this 
calculating temper that makes one tremble for 
the future of the Church. 

Only the adventurous Church will save her 
soul alive, and in doing so will save the world. 
The adventurous Church does not scheme or 
calculate. She has no programme and engineers 
no campaigns. She lives by her vision of God. 
Her only policy is to follow her Lord. She sees 
Jesus walking in the midst of a broken, bleeding 
world, and she asks the old question, Quo vadis, 
Domine ? It is the only burning question in the 
whole world, and the only question that will not 
long remain unanswered. What the answer will 
be we cannot say yet, but we know that it will 
be eloquent of a Cross. In that sign the Church 
will conquer as Christ conquered. 



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